Cancan Cleanse
As a long-time customer of this purveyor of excellent juices and juice cleanses, I was disheartened when I visited their website to order a three-day cleanse. I expected it to be the inspiring and informative experience that I had fallen in love with a few years back, but it was not.
The owner had contracted with some marketing folks, who created a WordPress / WooCommerce site that could not have looked less like the site I remembered. She told me later that she had grown accustomed to the site going down every four to six weeks!
My role: Designer, developer, and hosting provider.
View the Project
The Wayback Machine
On a whim, I reached out to the owner. She was very aware and asked for help in returning the site to her wholly unique and personality-driven brand.
We agreed to bring her brand back, but in a modern and fresh way – like her juice! – and improve her site performance and stability.
It would be vital to bring the design in line with current standards – responsiveness, wider content width, and simpler typography.
Fortunately, we were able to get most of the original original assets in source form, from her previous designer and her archives.
Rebrand and Redesign
The first priority for the rebrand and redesign was to bring back the assets – images, fonts, and colors. While the colors were easy, some of the fonts were obscure. When I was not able to procure a licensed font, I was able to substitute a similar one.
There were several assets that were core to her retro-style brand – the logo, the background tile, her caricature, and assorted icons and embellishments.
We also needed to raise the important content and action items above the fold, to improve on the wall of text that dominated the existing site.
I also created several “ads” to be used around the site to remind users of special product groupings or seasonal offerings.
Development Notes
- Immediately deactivating and deleting the bespoke plugins had an immediate effect, improving page load speed. I managed the site for over three years, and it never went down.
- As part of my normal WordPress hardening procedures, I moved WordPress into a separate directory, removed the “admin” user, installed the Wordfence plugin, and removed several unused or out-of-date plugins.
- I worked with the owner to reorganize the products into logical, searchable categories, and consolidated the product options into separate products with multiple options.
- Shipping was also an issue on the site, as it was set up in such a way that the user could select free shipping – why would they not? – to any location. Since free shipping was only available within San Francisco, I implemented zip code zones in WooCommerce.
- The current site used a commercial theme as a child theme of Storefront, a WooCommerce theme. For the new site, I built a custom theme and implemented Advanced Custom Fields to build a section-based page template.
Prologue
This project was only a few items on a punch list away from launching when both the owner and I ghosted it at the same time. She had taken a full-time position and I had a family member with a serious illness who later passed away. It was months before we were in touch. Shortly after that, she sold the business.
The new owner was not able to make decisions or pay to continue the project, while I did continue to manage the site for him for over a year, we have since parted ways. He has the theme. My work is archived on my domain.