The Olive Press

After rescuing The Olive Press from a website project gone horribly wrong, we were invited back to redesign and enhance our development efforts from a year ago.

Click image to enlargeNew Design

Click image to enlargePrevious Design

In 2009, we were contacted by The Olive Press to fix a big problem.  They had just finished a redesign and development of their website and the site had launched, but they couldn't get ahold of the developer and there were lots of dead links on their new site.  I browsed the new site and found, literally, 50% or more of the pages on the site showing up blank.

It didn't take much to convince them that Encaffeinated could help. Luckily, we had some open time in our schedule and could jump right on the job. We archived the visual assets from the site and rebuilt it entirely using a fresh ExpressionEngine back end, alongside CS-Cart, a PHP based shopping cart solution. Within a couple of weeks, we had rebuilt their new site using the design and navigation they had just approved before things went awry. 

We relaunched theolivepress.com with a solid CMS that allowed them to easily edit the site, and their new store worked great.  We found out later that the original developer had used a home-brewed CMS and a very low-powered and obscure store script that wouldn't have lasted long even if the developer hadn't disappeared.

About six months later, The Olive Press called again, this time wanting to redesign their website.  Since we'd already build a strong foundation with ExpressionEngine and CS-Cart, we could completely redesign and know that the data already in the system would integrate right into the new look and feel.  We lightened up the feel of the site and opened it up, removing the constricting boxy feel, and sprinkled content from deep within the site onto landing pages and the homepage to create a dynamic site with regular content updates as fresh as The Olive Press olive oil. The site instantly became more attractive and engaging. 

We also integrated the category-based navigation that CS-Cart provides by default into the global navigation of the entire site.  By building a custom ExpressionEngine plugin that fetches the current category tree from CS-Cart and displays it as the main menu, both the store and content sections of the site are always up to date when categories are added, edited or removed.  This gives site visitors a direct line into The Olive Press' sales funnel, and eases navigation to boot.

Throughout both projects with The Olive Press, we've helped the client increase sales and become more approachable to their customers.