Map Gear
A modern redesign of a live store without closing its doors.
Map Gear supplies professional geospatial equipment to surveyors, drone pilots, civil engineering firms, and GIS field teams across Australia. Their catalogue ranges from high-precision GNSS receivers, enterprise drones and LiDAR payloads to photogrammetry and field software that works alongside the hardware.
As they are a technical business selling to technical buyers, most customers arrive knowing what their needs are and assembling complex multi-part setups instead of buying single items.
The Challenge
With a very successful and active platform the system was already built with multiple security, functionality and performance layers: payments, shipping, accounting, inventory management, marketing rules, product bundles among others. We needed to ensure that all changes were compatible with the current architecture while improving any paint points.
The Approach
While the project required a very technical approach, we started defining the wireframes and sitemap to ensure the vision was supported by a solid information architecture. With that in place, we then moved to design following a highly collaborative approach with Map Gear. By taking inspiration from the brands they represent we managed to balance a modern look and feel with a user-friendly design that favour product discovery, speed and functionality.
As with any project, we built and tested in a fully isolated staging environment, keeping key modules from the live site to ensure unit, compatibility and integration tests were regularly performed.
Before committing to go-live, we ran multiple tests against a copy of production, verifying every integration under real conditions. The process was documented as a thirteen-phase checklist covering backups, deployment sequence, migration, verification, and a defined rollback threshold.
The Solution
Product-aware mega menu
A fully custom-built mega menu allowing users to navigate through categories, brands and industries while showing product thumbnails, live pricing, stock status, and sale badges directly in the navigation.
Custom theme and template system
We built a custom child theme and a full set of templates covering the key pages and editable areas on the site including homepage, header and footer, product pages, content pages, and categories. Campaign banners, brand grids, and promotional sections can now be built and adjusted by Map Gear's team without engaging a developer.
Consolidating custom logic
Customisations that had accumulated across the site were reviewed with the client and moved into version-controlled theme code where appropriate. What remains is documented, categorised, and traceable.
Performance and delivery
During the final phase we focused on leveraging hosting, DNS, edge delivery, and the website to optimise how the site performs live. Pages are cached at multiple, static assets are compressed and served from the nearest edge, and repeat visits draw on cached responses rather than rebuilding pages from scratch. The result is a website where every page loads in seconds, regardless of the user location or device.
The outcome
The redesigned store launched in May 2026 with no interruption to its operations. Orders, customer accounts, pricing, and every third-party integration carried across without loss or business disruption. The result is a site that presents Map Gear the way its customers already understand the business: technical, well-stocked, and confident.
Let's get to work
If you want your next marketing or web design initiative to be part of your success story, we’d love to hear from you. If you have a project in mind, but aren’t sure where to start, you can book a one hour free consultation with our team.
