Oakwood Cooperage came to me with a website that they were happy with from a design point of view, but that they couldn’t easily update. The original developer had hard-coded the content within the theme, so without an understanding of coding, they were unable to make even simple amendments. They also wanted to move the site away from a single page design to one that allowed for separate pages to highlight improve user experience and more focus their content across the site. In addition, the site had been poorly maintained, running old versions of WordPress and plugins that could have been a security risk to the site, so I was asked to resolve this issue.
My first task was to pull all of the existing content from the website. As we were to be expanding the page count, I also requested any extra imagery that Oakwood had, as the photoshoot that they had done was beautiful and really showed off the cooperage. I then set upon the job of replicating the exact layout of the existing site, while ensuring that it worked responsively to suit all screen sizes. This design work was then extended out to cover the additional pages that the cooperage had requested. Following this, tweaks were made to optimise the layouts for readability, all while maintaining the desired style from the original design.
Once I had completed the design work, I optimised the website for speed and then repointed the domain over to the new server.
My updated version of the site was immediately faster than the previous design and has been mobile optimised so that it looks great for any user. It was also designed so that Oakwood could make any content changes easily without having to deal with coding, as had previously been the case. The site performance dramatically improved on the relaunch and, as part of my maintenance agreement, the website is easily and regularly updated to keep it secure.
