My role has me in charge of managing an online e-commerce store in addition to creating, editing, and publishing informational YouTube and social media content for a family run outdoors store. This includes the redesign shown below but also general maintenance and upkeep of the site with all related systems and integrations.
YouTube content
As of 2024-03-22 the YouTube channel has 1.6k subscribers and 247,577 views over a total of 150 videos. If I had to pick one video that I think displays the quality of the content we produce, it would probably be SOLO ATP SAS SMOCK MK2 (2022) OVERVIEW | Camouflage Store. I am very grateful to Steve for the opportunity to continue working with him and for the amount of creative freedom he gives me when experimenting with new ideas.
Site redesign
New design as of 2022
Most recently I completed modernising the website which included moving it to Shopify from its previous CMS platform. This has resulted in the owner gaining more control over his business as he can now make changes to the site that would have previously required hiring a developer to do. Additionally, the new site is much more modern introducing benefits such as being mobile friendly, fast, and far more secure which will improve the experience for everyone.
Along with the switch of platform and hosting, we came to a decision that the domain and overall branding would need to be updated to to go along with the rest of the work being done. I felt it was important however that the original colour of red (#dd3e3e) was kept as it was a key part of the brand from all the way back in 2007.
Whilst making modifications to the theme I realised that the templating language, Liquid, was very similar to Hugo which I had only just recently begun using for my own site. Using a custom product metafield I was able to add a keywords section in the html head for better SEO. For each product this would concatenate the given strings to the end of the default keywords specified in the theme.liquid file.
<meta name="keywords" content="Camouflage Store, Camo, Outdoors, Devon, UK, ..., {{ product.metafields.custom.keywords }}">
The default border-radius of buttons was also unable to be changed within the theme so I used Shopify’s custom CSS feature to override the default styling on all affected elements. This instantly makes the site look more unique compared to others using the same theme.
Additionally, I found two bugs. Initially with the variant selection options on product pages which I was able to diagnose and fix in communication with the original theme developers. The change was then included within the next update. And lastly, an issue with pages locking up and crashing the entire browser tab or application. According to the developers this was due to the JavaScript in the theme having quotes in option names.
Here’s a look at the prior site as it was the day we switched over to using the new redesign.
Previous design
The redesigned site can now be found at camouflagestore.uk, in addition to its legacy domain of camouflage-store.com.
YouTube Cover Art
Other links
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