The Green Buffalo
The Company: The Green Buffalo is an online company that sells organic lifestyle products, with a focus on non-toxic personal pest protection.
The Gig: Redesign the site, new branding elements (logos, fonts, icons), basic social media integration, a lot of custom buttons, move it from one e-commerce platform to another, work within the Volusion templating system to develop a new layout for the site and re-organize the products and information in a way that is far easier for consumers to navigate. Get it all done on a pretty tight budget.
The Outcome: New site on a much more powerful platform with far more consistent integration of shipping and a much cleaner hierarchy of product listings. The new branding elements captured the bright and organic themes of a company that focuses on pet and child friendly solutions to problems.
Some afterthoughts:
Volusion is a powerful e-commerce platform and it has been used effectively by some heavy hitters in e-commerce.
It takes a while to get used to how Volusion organizes things, and how much plug-and-play functionality it actually has.
The .asp schema took a little bit of getting used to, but once it made sense, it was pretty easy to work with.
The largest frustration with Volusion is the heavy use of tables and inline styling for presentation in the product listings. While I’m sure there are more elegant solutions (I’ve thought of a few since I did this site!), in this case I ended up using some heavily nested selectors in order to control relatively small details.
The tradeoff with the above is that the client has a lot more ability to go into the back-end and change things on their own without needing a ‘webmaster’ (ha!) to make changes for them. This is a big deal for small businesses, who generally don’t have a full time website person.