Case Studies
At A Glance: WordPress; Woocommerce; Advanced Custom Fields; Custom Development
In 2016, following a thorough redesign process, I developed and deployed this WordPress site from a custom-built theme, utilizing WooCommerce, and was the main point of contact for the client until the end of 2023. In those 7 years, I worked very closely with the client to manage content, develop features, set up integrations and assist with customer concerns. I helped this client find and setup TaxJar when they expressed the need to collect GA taxes on a per-county basis. I also got them set up with MyWorks QuickBooks Online integration and helped identify issues with missing SKUs, prices and customer questions about orders. I helped identify and resolve errors between the website, QuickBooks and Authorize.Net.
Being a nursery with hundreds of products available throughout the year, there are certain issues that come up while doing business online. A few key functionalities I’ve developed in PHP and added to the site over the years include:
- Extra shipping fees for shipping to certain states and for different product categories. This can be done on a per product basis but because the client has hundreds of products, we found this approach to save them the most time when working on the product catalogue.
- Certain products cannot be purchased in combination with other products, so a check is made on the cart page to see what product categories are included, displaying a message (that can easily be edited in the WP backend) that alerts the customer about the conflict.
- Modified WC templates to include extra CTAs on product category pages, some of which check for custom field data to display different messages like On Sale or Out of Stock.
- Added extra information about the business to the bottom of emails sent from the YITH Gift Cards plugin.
- Fixed an issue with the Gift Cards plugin charging shipping for the virtual purchase when included in a cart with other products (at the time, this was a known issue and had not been patched but has since been fixed by the plugin developers).
- Added a shipping surcharge for each dozen products in cart from the edible-products category, which are the jams, jellies, wines, sauces, etc. because of the way they have to ship these glass containers.
- The nursery offers local pickup as an option during certain months of the year, so any carts that have special fees applied need to check for the customer’s shipping/pickup intent and account for it.
- Blocked customers at checkout if certain products in their cart were being shipped to certain states. For example, Currant and Gooseberry plants cannot be shipped to many Northeastern states.
At A Glance: WordPress; Page and Post Management; Design; Advanced Custom Fields; Custom Development
This project arrived in a state of disarray. The end client, HGHI, outsourced their new site redesign and after about 6 months, the original developers ghosted. We were hired to rescue the project. The previous developers created a custom theme, but it was, for lack of a better term, a mess. The template hierarchy was too specific and not scalable, colors and styles didn’t match designs, pages and templates were missing, archive templates were incomplete, features like sliders and photo galleries were not set up, custom code for modifying and displaying The Events Calendar posts were based on an older version of the plugin and the license was not purchased for this plugin.
After getting involved, I was able to take this project to the finish line under budget within 6 weeks, accomplishing the following:
- Created a floating sidebar with social links and working search bar.
- Set up The Events Calendar posts to use custom templates, pulling in only upcoming information where needed and filtering events by category for display on different pages.
- Created filter options for team pages, setting up team members to display in an easily reorganizable way.
- Worked closely with end client to perfect the IA for child pages within the About, Domains, and Opportunities pages.
- Created a pseudo slider for Youtube embeds and an image slider and gallery with lightbox functionality for the Stories archive.
- Created documentation for the end client on how to edit and maintain the site.
- Followed posted best web practices from Harvard to deliver the best website possible, according to their standards.
At A Glance: Craft CMS; Modular Development; Custom Development; Server Set-Up and Management
This is a Craft CMS based website for a mixed-use living apartment complex in Coumbus, GA. I learned a lot on this project, including: how to work within the Twig PHP template engine; how to set up Craft locally and on an nginx server; how to handle database migrations for Craft; how to purchase and set up plugins; how to prepare for SEO through Craft; how to plan for every module to be scalable and reusable, especially with expectations of making this a multisite installation in the future. Unfortunately, not all of the features I developed for this project are visible on the current site but here are some of things I made.
- Hero module that can display either a single image, an image slider, or an embedded video from Youtube, Vimeo, or self-hosted.
- The blue content in the hero module has multiple options, such as toggling the blue transparent box, toggling the CTA, multiple option for sizes and colors on any element, different displays depending on what content is in place.
- Parallax image backgrounds.
- Flip cards with more information, all boxes set to have the same height as the tallest one.
- Floorplans section that allows for different filters such as number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, and elevation within the building. Each floorplan has CTAs that can either lead to a downloadable version of the floorplan or link off to another page or website.
- Main content block with multiple options such as having a square image to either side, having an image on either side that spans the full width of its side, an option to have a CTA over the image that can open an image gallery lightbox.
- Set up a plugin that creates an image map, to which the user can add pins/points of interest with relevant information and links.
- Collaborated with the client’s IT and DevOps teams to properly set up the server that will be hosting this Craft CMS site, for production and staging.