ESCOM Bulgaria is a company founded in 2001 – an established partner and distributor of world-renowned manufacturers of information security solutions and technologies. Over the years, the company has expanded its portfolio annually, and by 2023, it is the leading distributor of 14 world-renowned brands, such as CyberInt, CyCognito, Reblaze and many more. In 2023, the company decided to redesign the escom-bg.com corporate website and contacted Almart Studio.
The original idea - redesign and renovation
The company’s initial idea was to redesign the website and streamline the administration processes. Prior to Almart Studio being granted access, an audit of the existing WordPress platform was carried out which identified the following key issues:
- The site's current platform, at the time, was created in 2014. Since then, partial updates have been made to the WordPress core and many different extensions have been added - needed and unneeded (the task of identifying what is used and where is quite complex).
- The server configuration is running an outdated version of PHP 5.4. Important PHP modules are missing that secure the WordPress platform.
- There is a lack of structuring of information on the site. No structuring of the data is done and everything is uploaded as blog posts.
- The site theme is outdated and does not use a theme builder (Page Builder). Accordingly, any changes to the design are difficult to implement and complex to administer by the average user.
The Almart Studio team considered that the accumulated cases on the ECCOM Bulgaria website at that time were too serious to be updated and redesigned smoothly. An additional argument is that the data is not structured and anyway needs to be brought into a form that meets modern search engine optimization standards.
- A completely new website development and installation is proposed and ECCOM Bulgaria agree with the specially prepared proposal of the studio.
Development process
Since, however, ECCOM Bulgaria had an existing website, Almart Studio created a working environment (staging) on which to develop the new site without affecting the current official web project.
So the process starts with the installation of a completely new PHP environment and a clean WordPress installation. The following activities are carried out during the development:
- Install a professional version of the theme builder - Elementor Pro.
- Content types and specialized fields are created. The information is classified by the different types - Producers, Solutions, News and Categories.
- Templates are created for the different content types.
- The information from the old site is transferred manually by revising and styling it visually. Add logos, images, video content, etc.
- All internal pages of the site, navigation menus, header and footer, etc. are laid out.
- Create contact and feedback forms.
- They do a detailed review of the entire site on different devices - mobile phones, tablets, different resolutions for desktops and laptops. Where design changes are required.
- Integration of the site with Google Tag Manager is done, where the analytics tools, cookie policy management and more are added.
- Loads the WPML multilingual module, and all the content poured in is translated through an automated robot - DeepL.
- Install the Yoast SEO module and optimize the content. For all old links on the existing site, redirects are made to the new data structure.
- Caching and speed optimization modules are added.
- The work environment is migrated to live and the site is live. Queries are launched to search engines for new indexing of the entire site.
Instead of a conclusion
The new website of ECCOM Bulgaria is already a fact. With its renewed online vision, the company confirms its commitment to following innovation and new technologies. Almart Studio as a reliable partner, continues its cooperation with the company. The studio is available at any time for consultation and technical support, which proves the standards it professes in the field of web technology and marketing.
