Website Design
Since 2005, Mount Pleasant based, The Coastal Cupboard has been “the Lowcountry’s most complete kitchen store”. They stock a wide variety of quality items for all of your kitchen, entertainment and grilling needs. Unfortunately, their website has not always told this story to it’s fullest potential.
The client came to us with a list of seemingly simple requests that had evaded the previous website designers:
- Update branding & identity to elevate their perception and market position
- Make sure the site is easy to update and manage in-house
- Create a simple way for customers to buy a gift card online
- The site should just “work” without downtime and technical issues
We accomplished each of these goals and gave The Coastal Cupboard a website that will last for years to come.
Read on to learn more about how we did it.
ADVERTISING AGENCY
SERVICES FOR THIS PROJECT
VISIT THE SITE
“Working with the good folks at Peninsula has been nothing short of a great experience. They take the time to get to know you, your brand, and what YOU want, and then somehow manage to exceed the expectations set. Our website is clean, easy to update, and just works. Great overall experience!”– Brad P., The Coastal Cupboard
BRAND DEVELOPMENT
We always begin website design projects by analyzing the brand and looking for areas of improvement. If you walk into The Coastal Cupboard, the first thing you will notice is that it’s full of colorful products and gadgets. We wanted to highlight this on the website so visitors would get excited about the variety they have to offer. Because of this, we kept the brand colors bold yet simple to stay out of the way and let the product photography shine.
ELEGANT, BOLD AND SOPHISTICATED
The color scheme includes a bold red with refined shades of grey and black. The palette leaves ample white space to feature their beautiful photography more prominently. We also decided to use a slate cutting board image as a backdrop for certain to promote an upscale kitchen theme. We selected Herr Vonn Muellerhoff as the primary headline and page title font to give a bit of elegant flair and kept the rest of the fonts simple, legible and reserved, using the Open Sans Font Family.
The client was very pleased with these updates and we used them as the brand guidelines for the website design process.
A STRIKING WEBSITE THAT IS EASY TO UPDATE
Many brick & mortar retailers are leery of putting too many products on their website because inventory can shift quickly and the website is just another element to keep updated. With this in mind, we wanted to design a website that would be so easy to add things the client could do it from their phone and it would still loo great.
That is why we leveraged the power of the WordPress blogging feature to make each of the frequently updated sections “posts” that filter into place automatically. We set up the formatting ahead of time to make it very easy.
Each Event, Cooking Class, Recipe and “Kitchen Gadget of the Week” section can be quickly uploaded or removed. We made it where past events are automatically removed from the website for one less thing to worry about. They can even seamlessly sell tickets through their website with the flick of a switch – if they so desire. Pretty sweet, huh?
We love finding creative ways to make our client’s lives a little bit easier.
MOBILE FRIENDLY WITH RESPONSIVE DESIGN
None of what we have done so far would matter if it were not all user friendly across all devices. Many of our clients see up to 70% of their traffic coming from mobile devices so we knew that this would be a priority for their upscale/affluent target audience. Every website that we build is mobile-friendly as a top priority.
SIMPLE YET POWERFUL ECOMMERCE
The client wanted a simple and easy to use eCommerce interface to sell gift cards. This included a field where the customer could put in the custom amount of their choice and pay by credit card securely with an encrypted checkout.
We leveraged WooCommerce for this knowing that it was more than enough, but gave the client the option to scale into a full eCommerce operation at any time easily and efficiently. Each project that we undertake we focus on the long term best interest of the client to ensure seamless scalability.
BULLETPROOF CLOUD BASED HOSTING
We leverage cloud based dedicated WordPress hosting for all of our WordPress websites, ensuring 99% up-time and 24hr customer support.
This gives us and our clients the peace of mind to know that their website is safe and secure. We also include a CDN for speed and SSL Certificate for extra security included with every hosting plan.
Another feature that we (and our clients) couldn’t live without is a staging environment that allows us to present changes to the client for approval without disrupting the live version of the website.
This combination of powerful ingredients provided this client assurance to know the website would “simply work”, at all times.
Like What You See?
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LET’S DISCUSS YOUR GOALS
Tell us about your WordPress website development project and we can schedule a time for a free consultation. If you are located in Charleston we can come to you or we can host a virtual meeting. We look forward to hearing from you!