Soiland Company is an incorporated entity comprised of Grab N’ Grow Soil Products, Stony Point Rock Quarry, and Soils Plus Soils and Amendments. The websites were clunky, had poor content architecture, and strayed from the corporation’s branding guidelines. In addition to a poor design, the WordPress platform was outdated and had a lot of vestigial software running to achieve functionality through insufficient means.
I suggested we create a parent theme which would be symbolically linked to all website installations on the server. Then, we would create child themes to overrides styles, post types, and other details for each individual site. This allowed us to create multiple WordPress themes justly slightly over the budget of one.
Project Team
I first designed Grab N’ Grow’s website for mobile and desktop. Once the design was approved I was able to duplicate and re-use the design working flies to change out the way colors were applied to each site design.
The final design uses a particular color scheme for each website, based on the logo design for each business. Photography was selected to reflect the industry products for each business such as gardening, mining tools, or rock quarries. The websites serve up a consistent parallax effect across pages. Various hover effects over images and buttons enhance user interaction. On mobile the user can bring up a modal and select various social links, where they wouldn’t have fit in the top bar design like they do on desktop.
The project was a great success! We were able to re-approach the color scheme for Soils Plus in our development phase to correct some of the issues we were having in the mockup/design phase. This project started with the three websites and expanded to two others which followed the same design approach as the others.
