Breathing New Life into a Magento Website for The Expanded Metal Company

We are experts at fixing, maintaining, and supporting existing sites, especially in e-commerce, most days we improve what is already there, make it faster, clearer, and easier to manage, rather than rebuilding for the sake of it. This project is a great example of that mindset in action on Magento.

We did not do a ground up rebuild, we kept all the existing Magento mechanics and functions and put a brand new skin over the top. The big gain came from twenty years of learning how customers buy online, and how a manufacturer like EMC sells, then shaping the Magento front end, navigation, and content around those behaviours. Huge thanks to Natalie Nicols and the EMC team, their clarity made fast progress possible.

What stayed, what changed

Stayed the same, Magento as the platform, the catalog architecture, pricing rules, account structures, order flows, and the integration touchpoints staff use every day, including Epicor.

Changed for the better, the visual design, layout, information hierarchy, and how Magento presents product data, applications, and use cases, all tuned to real buying journeys for specifiers, buyers, and repeat trade customers.

The Magento facelift, guided by behaviour
• Navigation that mirrors how people shop, we reorganised menus, categories, and layered navigation so customers can browse by application, material, mesh size, gauge, and spec, using Magento’s native attributes and filters.
• Cleaner product pages, we surfaced the right detail at the right time, technical data, downloads, certifications, and stronger imagery, making Magento’s content blocks work harder.
• Search that understands intent, we tuned on site search, synonyms, and filtering so common queries land on useful results, not dead ends.
• Performance housekeeping in Magento, we trimmed third party scripts, tightened theme assets, optimised images, and ensured indexers, cache, and cron are doing their job, quick on 4G as well as office broadband.
• Editor friendly publishing, reusable blocks, sensible templates, and a tidy Magento admin so the EMC team can update content without wrestling the CMS.
• The fundamentals that matter, technical SEO, accessible colour contrast, clean URLs, and structured data, steady foundations, no drama.

Magento, without breaking the back office

Manufacturing sites live alongside internal systems, Epicor in EMC’s case. Because we kept the underlying Magento mechanics, nothing critical in the back office was disrupted.
• Inventory and pricing sync continues on schedule, Magento receives stock levels and prices from Epicor with the same safeguards and fallbacks.
• Order handoff is unchanged, Magento pushes orders into Epicor for fulfilment and invoicing, status updates flow back so customer comms stay aligned.
• Customer specific pricing and terms remain intact, Magento still respects trade rules defined in Epicor.
• Decoupled integration and monitoring, authenticated APIs, queues where appropriate, clearer logging and alerts, Magento keeps serving pages even if an endpoint blips.

This is the balance Magento projects need, move confidently on the customer facing layer, respect the operational backbone.

Why this works on Magento

Magento is powerful, it has moving parts, caches, indexers, modules, and theme intricacies, starting from scratch can be costly, risky, and unnecessary. Here, the engine was sound, the skin and the signposting needed attention. With two decades in e-commerce support and maintenance, we made Magento feel modern and effortless without changing the foundations the business relies on.

The result

It is still the existing Magento website, now vastly improved, clearer journeys, faster pages, stronger product storytelling, and no disruption to Epicor, order processing, or staff workflows. It shows what The Expanded Metal Company does best, serious capability, proven applications, products that solve real world problems, and it does it in a way that matches how their customers actually buy.

Want to take a look

If you work with expanded metal, or you just appreciate a well put together Magento site, give it a browse. If your own Magento website feels creaky, you probably do not need a rebuild, you might just need a new skin and a buying journey that matches how your customers think, we can help you rethink, not rebuild, and keep your integrations, Epicor included, running smoothly.