about the project

Bond Timber are a timber merchant based in Cornwall who since closing their retail store and going fully digital, needed a new website to support this transition and increased demand.

Business Requirements

Bond Timber are a timber merchant based in Cornwall who since closing their retail store and going fully digital, needed a new website to support this transition and increased demand. Bond Timber supply timber for construction, gardening and fencing for both trade customers and the general public throughout the South West of England. Bond Timber is a family business, that has grown from its agricultural roots to become one of the leading timber processors and suppliers in the South West

Before approaching Chilliapple, Bond Timber had a Magento 2 site that allowed customers to place orders. As Bond Timber was successfully scaling its business within the industry, it was time to expand its digital online presence and move onto a platform that would support offline functionality, as this would serve their customers in remote areas in the timber trade. Taking this all into account, chilliapple suggested for Bond Timber to migrate onto a Progressive Web Application (PWA) to make use of a light framework which provides users with enhanced speed and access to the web app with little or no internet connection, and is more affordable than the creation of a traditional mobile app.

The Solution

PWAs are a relatively new technology and this was chilliapple’s first project of its kind. To kick off the project, our Business Development Manager, Project Manager and Designer met with Bond Timber to scope out the project and put together a plan for how the project was going to be run.

The client needed a sophisticated website with an easy-to-use UX & UI, so chilliapple’s in-house design team worked closely with the client during the design process and prepared various mock-ups until we reached one that best reflected their values.

A Progressive Web App is a website that looks and behaves like a mobile app. PWAs take advantage of native mobile device features, without requiring end users to install an app via an app store. They are the perfect amalgamation of unique features, high-yielding functionalities and seamless user experience on any device.

The Results

During the build, a new version of Magento (2.4.6) was released, so the client asked us to upgrade the site to the latest Magento version during development. We also migrated them to a new server from the hosting provider ANS as their previous Operating System was due to expire in 6 months.

We ran into various PWA-specific bugs throughout the build such as payment gateway and blog page bugs inherent to Magento, but were able to overcome these blockers and deploy the website with many lessons learned from our first PWA build.

We are continuing to make iterations and improvements to the site since onboarding Bond Timber as a support client with our Account Management team.