Beyond The Duero – a Pixel-Perfect Blog and Bookshop

Client

This project was the one that gave our team a unique and varied experience. Tim, being a fascinating person – he speaks two languages, fluently and writes books on his travels with photo illustrations, is also a demanding client. He has a 25-year experience in printing and has an eye for the designs. Thus, the site needed to be gripping and eye-catching.

Tim came to us in January 2019 with ready designs and a great disappointment in two previous developers. It’s important to note that one of the earlier developers was close, but couldn’t understand and tell Tim that he was accidentally using a wrong testing technique. Which meant, they saw two different things on their screens.

GOAL

Our client had already got ready designs for his site, and we had to do the rest – front-end coding and programming to make a blog-and-shop bilingual WordPress site. It needed to be pixel-perfect, responsive, and more importantly, it had to look good on all screen sizes, even those that are still in the tech labs. Our other mission was to achieve the result that Tim needed and that the previous developers couldn’t deliver. We had to be the third and the last ones who would finally bring the site to life.

PROGRESS

The client came to us with the designs in the Adobe Illustrator (.ai) format (a vector format adored by the print designers), so we had to begin practically from scratch. It was a real challenge, as the designs had to be pixel-perfect, but .ai files were even not in pixels, they were in centimeters and with decimal numbers. This unit mismatch had significantly complicated and slowed down the front-end coding process. Thanks to Tim, who had redone all the mockups by himself, the work moved along faster.

That took us quite a lot of time; we made numerous revisions and spent countless hours reading Tim’s feedbacks and making corrections to our code. Finally, the first milestone was approved, and we began turning making dead code alive with back-end programming. It was another exciting task, as there were many unique features to be developed.

Another challenge was to make WordPress plugins work together: Woocommerce to sell products and WPML to make the site bilingual. It wasn’t easy, as these two plugins were in “conflict” with each other and it took us some time to “reconcile” them.

To implement newsletter, we had to use a MailChimp integration to avoid using an unnecessary plugin that could flood the site with subscriptions and negatively affect the site performance.

ACHIEVED RESULT

A fully custom pixel-perfect site, attractive and intriguing invites you for a voyage beyond the river Duero and all over the world. Here are some exciting features of this site.

Pop-ups appear as soon as you enter the site.

The shop and the blog side function separately – the independent search is possible for each of them, and the links from the footer are different. You can choose three types of currency and either English or Spanish edition. You can even add both versions to the cart without leaving a product page. How convenient! The publication of new posts and products can be scheduled for two months ahead through the admin panel.

Books and prints can be delivered throughout the world, and the delivery cost is calculated automatically according to the delivery country/region/state and local taxes. Are you ready for a virtual voyage? Then click here.