Responsive WordPress eCommerce educational artist/woodworking website redesign.
Paul Schurch of Schurch Woodwork is a very well known veneer artist and is a trusted provider of marquetry information, educational how to videos and articles, tools, materials, veneer and supplies. Paul told me last year that he wanted to update to his successful but somewhat dated html eCommerce website schurchwoodwork.com which had been built several years ago. Since I had recently created Paul’s other new website veneerartist.com and he’s been quite satisfied with it, he offered me the project to update schurchwoodwork.com and I was very happy to accept the offer. I’m impressed with the work that Paul does in his shop, I hope I get a chance to take a class of his some time, I’m especially interested in learning semi-precious stone inlay, but would love to learn any of the skills that Paul teaches.
Before I met Paul I had never heard the term “marquetry”. I actually thought he had said “marketing” when I first spoke with him, it took me a while to figure out what he was talking about. I knew the term “inlay” of course and I think the average person thinks of what Paul does as inlay, but Paul’s favored terms are marquetry and veneering. He would know!
Rebuilding the schurchwoodwork.com website was quite a large project. First I redesigned the Schurch Woodwork logo and then set to work designing a custom responsive child theme for the Genesis Framework on WordPress using WooCommerce to add the eCommerce functionality. It was a great challenge to organize the site in a comprehensible layout that would look good on a computer, tablet or phone and would work the way it’s supposed to work on all browsers. The project mainly then consisted of bringing all the existing content and products into the new site and making sure it was all now responsive and attractive and SEO friendly. I think it turned out great!
Paul’s site is the first WooCommerce eCommerce design I have done which required a shipping module. WooCommerce is a free plugin but it only includes flat rate shipping or free shipping and that is what I had used on my previously designed WooCommerce sites. I would say there’s a definite need for a better selection of affordable professional shipping modules for WooCommerce. Adding Fedex shipping to the site was the most expensive feature other than the redesign time.
Paul had asked for a 3 panel slider for the homepage, so I custom designed one using the Slideshow plugin, and made it full-width and responsive.
I’d used the Event Organiser plugin on a site I previously designed for a band and I liked the plugin a lot, but thought this time I might want to use a plugin that syncs with Google Calendar, I tried it out, but ended up going back to Event Organiser, because it has a lot of nice features and I like the design better, even though of course I added my own CSS and page template edits. Also, Event Organiser does import and export ICS files for use in Google and other calendars if Paul ever needs that feature.
While I was working on the site I stumbled upon Max Mega Menu. I liked it so much that I installed it here on my own website, but haven’t done much with it here yet. I have put it to good use on Paul’s site though. It’s a very versatile plugin.
Paul has a growing FAQ section on his site and wanted something expandable on the new site, so I experimented with several FAQ plugins and finally settled on HTML5 Responsive FAQ.
I used Safe Redirect Manager to redirect the old html urls to the new site. I chose it because it allowed me to use a wildcard for the main sections of the site.
Paul has lots of new content to add to the site now that it’s been updated with a new design and a new more user friendly format. Stay tuned!
Elizabeth