The Brief
Fraser Portraits approached OWA in 2023 to provide a full-service solution for an existing ecommerce web application used to run its thriving school photography and portraiture business. Alongside system development to meet future user and administrative needs, this also involved hosting and supporting the application.
This highly bespoke system had evolved in stages over a number of years, building on the photographers’ original film-based output as this gradually moved into the digital age. A key part of OWA’s brief was therefore to benchmark the system before any new development, identifying improvements to user experience (UX) and efficiencies in workflows for both customers and admins alike.
About Fraser Portraits
Fraser Portraits is a successful professional photography and portraiture business working in schools across the south of England with children of all age groups.
Founded in 1978, it is still a family-run company and also offers photography services in sectors beyond education, including the military and bespoke events.
Our Approach
When on-boarding a new customer’s existing web application, mobile app or website, we always stress the importance of working through the necessary initial steps in as much detail as possible, as this saves time and cost and derisks the process.
After an introductory session with the Fraser Portraits project team to better understand the business and user needs, we began mapping the technology stack and implementation – a headless web application using Python and Django framework with a front-end in React.
We also tested the application's stability to identify the most suitable hosting provision, before migration to OWA's secure environment. Moving the system from cloud hosting to our own UK-based data centres meant we could offer full-service support for both the application and hosting, while also reducing Fraser Portraits' monthly costs.
As the system lacked formal documentation, we completed our orientation with a deep dive to benchmark the functionality, system logic, workflow, dependencies, database, the screens and how all of these fitted together.
We were then able to move quickly into a programme of agreed work packages, focusing on security updates to the framework, and optimisations in code and storage to boost speed. Alongside this, with over six million files in the system, including many hi-res images, we upgraded the server to improve overall performance and load-balancing.
With the underlying technology and hosting now fully performant, we have most recently been working on UX improvements for customers and admins through user interface (UI) refinements on front-end screens and the ecommerce back-end.
How we helped
On-boarding a large existing web application to optimise security, hosting and implementation in readiness for future development.
Streamlining system to make it more robust through changes to data architecture, workflow and application logic.
Working collaboratively to translate business and technical needs into enhancements for users and administrators through a roadmap of incremental work packages.
