M2 Tiles & Paint

Goal of project

I worked in the M2 Tiles & Paint showroom/store between 12th June 2021 and 13th August 2022. When I joined, the store eCommerce website had been developed by a third-party on Shopify. Although the functionality of the eCommerce site was on par with what M2 Tiles & Paint needed at the time, the UI and UX were very poor. This was a substantial issue for the store, as it marketed itself as a place to get practical and professional design advice for the homes of customers; having a bland, unappealing website negatively impacted the public image of M2 Tiles & Paint significantly.

Thankfully, most of the technical functionality of the website had already been setup (aside from a few incorrect product details). Shopify provides a good deal of aesthetic choices, while keeping the process of building a website relatively simple. Given this information, I decided to start the website from scratch between breaks from talking to customers.

Immediately, my design provided a much better representation of the business. My keen eye for detail provided the online store with a beautiful look and feel - going from a dull white and green colour scheme, to a vibrant range of hue, given in large part by the store’s wide selection of gorgeous paints and tiles.

Later in the process, I connected Google Analytics to the website, which demonstrated to M2 Tiles & Paint where marketing resources should be focussed.

Challenges Faced

As Shopify does most of the technical work for you, building the M2 Tiles & Paint website wasn’t a huge hurdle. The larger problem came with the sheer scale of the website. M2 Tiles & Paint is a stockist of multiple suppliers from across Europe - totalling 18,000+ products that would be displayed on the website. Using a .csv Microsoft Excel file, I manually documented all products with appropriate descriptions, prices, images, tags and more.

Being the first large web project, M2 Tiles & Paint gave me the motivation and knowledge to begin my front-end engineering career. Although it wasn’t a huge technical challenge, knowing that I could effectively create a beautiful web design that would perfectly match the businesses brand identity led me to kickstart my freelance work, and later found Choice Digital Studio.