A couple of months ago I got a tweet from Tracy Sullivan of Design Schooled Kids about creating a web site for her line of stationery for kids. It was an interesting project both because of the products themselves – stationery that teaches kids to read and write – and because it posed some unique challenges where design and development was concerned.

Well, actually the design portion was already handled by Tracy herself. The challenge in that regard lay in taking Tracy’s clean and exact designs and making them appear on the web as they did on paper. As for development the main challenge was that although this was to be an online store she wanted it to look nothing like an online store.  So basically the project consisted of taking a new site concept from a paper mock-up to a fully working website. Exactly the kind of stuff I like to do.

Taking WordPress right to the edge

The result of a lot of hard work is a website that in my view takes WordPress right to the edge of what it is capable of. Every element of the site is custom built from my basic WaveFront theme to create a look, feel and operation that in no way resembles or even hints at WordPress or a regular e-commerce CMS. That said there is no real reason why any site, WordPress blog or otherwise, should look a certain way. A CMS is after all just a HTML generator that spits out whatever you want it to, and once you have the HTML you can use CSS to display it any way you want. The true challenge here was centered around getting the e-commerce portion to look, work and feel less like a boxed e-commerce solution and more like something classy and custom even though it was built on top of the WP eCommerce plugin. So while on the back end this is a fairly standard WordPress installation with pages, a blog (upcoming) and an e-commerce component, on the outside it looks like a custom site with all the bells and whistles built from scratch. Which is exactly what both Tracy and I wanted.

Ultra-clean designs pose unique challenges

Tracy is a designer of my heart: Obsessively detailed and extremely picky. (To be honest I don’t think you can call yourself a designer if you don’t fall into these categories, but that’s just me.) Her designs looked easy enough, but the true challenge lay in matching her static pages created in InDesign to live dynamic pages on the web. With such a rigid frame to work inside all the regular cross-browser problems like padding- and margin widths, positioning, font sizes etc that we normally choose to ignore or just tweak till they fit within acceptible buffer zones were all of a sudden make-it-or-break-it points that had to be done exactly right. The most notable example was that when each page loaded, whatever page content was in the “content” section of the layout had to line up perfectly with the topmost menu item. Sure, that’s easy enough if all the content is the same, but in this case we were working with four fundamentally different types of pages: Plain text pages for general info (home, about etc), dynamic index pages for each product line consisting of a header image plus a series of thumbnails for each product, single product pages with a larger image off the top with product stats and purchase buttons on the right and info underneath and finally shopping cart pages.

This meant the site demanded entirely separate style codes for the different elements depending on the type of page (or more specifically page template) was being displayed. And all these styles had to be flexible enough to be applied to the same item in different ways depending on the current template. Normally this would be easy enough to solve by using custom page templates, but in this case we were using the WP eCommerce plugin which generated all the product indexes, single product pages and shopping carts. As a result I had to dissect the eCommerce plugin pretty much line by line to find where all these elements were generated and how to go about repositioning them. What I found was a plugin that although it looks amazing on the outside was actually quite messy behind the curtain. I won’t write any further on this topic here – suffice it to say if you want WP eCommerce to do something that’s not just basic implementation you better prepare yourself for hours of decrypting bizarre code layouts and counter intuitive solutions. More on that in a different post.

In the end I created multiple theme files for the theme itself as well as the WP eCommerce plugin that allowed for micromanaged control of all the different pages. Not an easy task, but more than doable given enough time and some good background music.

Overall I’d say DesignSchooledKids.com has been my most challenging project to date, not because of the design or development elements of the baisc site but because the WP eCommerce plugin falls short in way too many places. In the end I made it all work the way it should but that was only because I spent an enormous ammount of time fixing or all together rewriting the code in the plugin so it would behave properly. It’s a bit of a disappointment really but now that I know how all the pieces fit together I should be able to reproduce it in the future.

Visit Design Schooled Kids and check out both what WordPress can do and what Tracy has to offer.