727 Sailbags, based at La Base de Lorient Grand Large, an internationally renowned preparation and training center for ocean racing, is a key player in the Morbihan sailing world. It's also one of the nuggets that undoubtedly contribute to Brittany's international reputation. Using boat sails received at their recycling center, these lovers of the sea create lifestyle accessories and ready-to-wear for men and women. You'll find their bags, poufs, cushions, lampshades and sailboats at www.727sailbags.com but also in 7 boutiques on the Atlantic coast (including 2 seasonal stores), and numerous retailers in France and abroad. 727Sailbags has also had its own boutique in the United States for almost two years.
727 Sailbags approached Soledis in 2021 to redesign their online sales site with 4 requirements:
- Put their website to work for their international development
- Improve the graphic universe and UX of their online sales site
- Connect Fastmag POS software to Prestashop
- Don't lose out on SEO
The Soledis project team testifies on this case study:
Prestashop 1.7 multi-boutique and multilingual
Since the redesign, the 727Sailbags teams can manage their two websites from a single back office, thanks to the multi-boutique feature. Prestashop.
One of its online sales platforms is a multilingual site (FR, DE, GB), aimed at the entire European market. The second is an English-only platform for the American market, linked to their physical store in Annapolis, Maryland. 727 Sailbags therefore benefits from two of Prestashop's great advantages: multi-boutique and multilingual. In addition, we have carried out a number of specific developments adapted to their needs and internal operations.
Graphics
727Sailbags has an in-house graphics studio that designed the layouts for their new website. As it's not a web studio, the mock-ups were made in Indesign, a program normally used for print.
I'm usually the one who creates the layouts in Adobe XD. For this customer, my role was a little different: I had to adapt the content of the Indesign mock-ups to transmit it to Nicolas, Front-end developer at Soledis, in web format. There are a number of small adaptations that we don't think about: resizing images, vectorizing pictograms made on Illustrator or even evaluating font size by eye: on Indesign it's measured in points, but on the web we generally speak in pixels!
My aim was to make it easier for my front-end developer colleague to integrate the web.
Natural referencing
SEO is something that needs to be thought out and worked on before a website is even designed. Everything to do with content is in the hands of the customer when writing pages and product sheets, but there are technical elements that are the responsibility of the web agency. At Soledis, our webmarketing department offers SEO support for website redesigns.
Before each site goes online, we check around fifty points, half of which have an impact on SEO.
Here are a few examples:
- Redirection plan for old urls: to anticipate redirections (if the redesign involves changes to urls), we map the existing site, list the redirections to be planned and then test their correct implementation.
- No internal 404 errors
- A clean, structured Hn plan
- Image optimization (ALT tags, image weight, etc.)
- Title tag migration
- Generate and submit an updated sitemap.xml
- No duplication of internal content
- Presence of an optimized robots.txt
- Presence of href lang tags in the case of a multilingual site
- Page load time check
- Takeover of existing content (articles, guides, blog, categories, product sheets)
A website redesign is always sensitive, which is why we make sure that all the lights are on before putting a redesign into production. We do these checks before going live on the development version, then on D-Day on the production version, and finally, we do a performance analysis a month later, to make sure everything's ok.
In certain cases, and depending on the customer's maturity, we can go further and offer complete strategic support: benchmarking, content strategy and semantic analysis, SEO optimization of the site (internal linking, tree structure proposal, optimization of titles, headings, content), netlinking strategy, onsite marketing recommendations, UX, SEA strategy, SMO strategy, loyalty, etc.
For 727sailbags, for example, we added a blog to their initial project with the aim of improving their SEO.
If, like 727Sailbags, you would like to benefit from our 360° web expertise, please contact us. To find out more about this case study, see also a testimonial on the Prestashop e-commerce blog.
