Jean-Christophe Novelli needs no introduction - if you don't know who he is, then you watch shockingly little TV. Despite his celebrity status he's actually very down to earth; when we met for the first time last year to discuss redesigning his website, it was obvious this process would be an enjoyable one.

The Novelli team already knew the website's major failings; it was almost impossible to keep course information up to date with the clunky administration tools, and the order process was tedious for customers, not allowing more than one attendee to be booked on a course at a time. The challenge was to solve these problems to a budget and a deadline – the Christmas sales period was looming!

First off, we sat down with the people charged with keeping the website up to date. Normally we put aside some time to chat and have them talk us through the process, but in this case the process was literally taking up every minute of their day. So instead we chatted between the long pauses while the system loaded a page or saved a change, and observed the process in real-time.

The administration tools weren't up to the task, every process was convoluted and the application itself groaned under the strain of performing even relatively small tasks.

"It's a nightmare to use if you're on the phone to a customer, you have to keep chatting while you wait for it to do something in case they think you've hung up!" half-joked one member of the team.

After a few sessions we identified what mattered the most, what the team did often and what was time-critical. When we built the new tools we made sure that the vital processes were as simple and streamlined as possible. Many of the changes weren't rocket science, like automatically sending an invoice and voucher to customers when they order, instead of one of the team having to write an email, attach the relevant documents, and send it to the customer manually. That saved a lot of time!

The buying process was a joke. There's no getting around it, it was just awful. From find a course to give me your credit card details, not one step in the elongated process was intuitive or reassuring for the visitor. Worst of all, if you ordered a course for two or more people, you were only asked for one person's details, which meant lots of calls to the Novelli team by confused visitors. I suspect a lot of people just gave up.

More than half the planning time went into creating a great buying experience. We gave customers two ways to find a course; either by using the calendar to choose a date, or by course category where they can select something specific to their interests and tastes. And the order process? Well, we built it with care and finesse, as Jean-Christophe himself would prepare a dish. We kept it brief, but made sure we asked the questions that needed to be asked. You can see the results for yourself.

The new website went live just before the Christmas sales period and the figures so far mean Jean-Christophe will be very busy this year. If you love good food (I think we all know the answer?), we invite you to sample the Novelli Academy website.