Bespoke web catalog for a Swiss local e-bikes retailer

Keywords: Laravel, PHP, MySQL, Vue.js, Bootstrap, SASS, SEO, Bitbucket Pipelines, Dusk, PHPUnit, Bugsnag

Easycycle Sàrl is a reference e-bike shop in French Switzerland.

Their old website was becoming very expensive to maintain, since it had not been built in a modular way that would allow for evolution and growth. After careful thought, the client decided it was time to update this web catalog to more modern tools and patterns.

After a careful study of the available options, we decided to build a custom solution based on Laravel and Bootstrap, rather than implementing a CMS that would soon limit our freedom in terms of user interface design and customization.

Easycycle

The new app code was written in a modular way by following the model-view-controller pattern that Laravel provides. The HTML interfaces were built mobile-first with a strong focus on responsiveness. Search engine optimization was a very important concern and so every page’s content, meta tags and social media metadata was chosen carefully. Page load speed was equally important, which justified an extra engineering effort to produce product images at different sizes for the responsive screens and a cache layer that would alleviate the load on the database engine.

The new platform features a full custom administration panel, bike lists, full-text search, a product comparison tool, a news module integrated with Facebook, on-the-fly PDF generation and a carefully crafted responsive interface.

The site serves over 10k monthly visits with an initial page load of under 200ms.

Design by CHAT&SA and content edition by microtxt.