Can you build an e-commerce website using WordPress? The answer is yes! We worked with tool watch maker Berkbinder and Brown to develop this website www.berkbinderandbrown.com

After a successful kickstarter campaign, Ted Brown from Berkbinder and Brown needed to make his product available to his customers. The website design needed to emphasize the slogan: Rugged. Functional. Beauty. and it needed to be done on the budget of a start-up business, within the next 1-2 months. The site also needed to be updated with new products by Berkbinder and Brown and have the potential to integrate with social networks. With those dynamics and expectations in play, WordPress seemed like the best solution. After some contemplation about the best plan of attack, we went to our friends at Storefront Themes to see what they had been recently developing. Store Front Themes develops well-designed themes that integrate tightly with the WordPress e-Commerce Plugin. This eliminates the mystery of how to integrate the plugin with your website and gives you a good backbone of code to start from.

We decided on the Elegance Theme from Store Front Themes and in the image below you can really see how our design took advantage of the layout of this theme.


We worked hard to brand the theme in a way that made Berkbinder and Brown proud to show off their product and establish a presence on the web for their brand.

Once the theme was in place and the look and feel was decided on we began adding content to the site. Adding products is as easy as adding pages in WordPress. Each product is given it’s own category so it can easily be sorted through the main navigation. And the WordPress-eCommerce plugin allows you to get into all the little nooks and crannies of an e-commerce website through the WordPress Dashboard.

We ran into very few problems while working with both the theme and the plugin. Getting the taxes and shipping rates lined up takes time and testing. In the end though this is a cost effective and beautiful way to show off your product to your customers and others shopping for a unique, hand-crafted gift. Thanks Berkbinder and Brown for this opportunity. If you are interested in creating an e-commerce website for your product feel free to contact us.

Each week we will be highlighting a WordPress website designed by our team. This week we’ll take a look at author, speaker, and mother Tracey Bianchi’s website www.traceybianchi.com.

Tracey is a talented writer and speaker who uses her words and actions to impact communities and people of all ages, in Christ’s name. She is a freelance writer and speaker for a variety of national organizations such as Redbud Writers Guild, MOPS International, Sojourners, FullFill Magazine, and Christianity Today’s Gifted for Leadership. Her first book, Green Mama: The Guilt Free Guide to Helping You and Your Kids Save the Planet was released through Zondervan Publishers in early 2010. She currently serves as pastor of women’s ministry at Christ Church of Oak Brook and is an intricate part of the contemporary service 2HC. All this aside Tracey keeps her kids and family closest to heart and her love for the Lord even closer transforming her into the highly impactful and radical person she is today.

Her site was designed to reflect back all these gifts and talents. Tracey needed a platform on which to share with the world her experiences, life lessons, and inspirations. WordPress was a simple choice for the content management system allowing Tracey to use a familiar interface with the power of the wordpress blogging engine. A simple choice but not a simple task. Tracey’s former site was built on Expression Engine and we needed to migrate the blog from Expression Engine to WordPress. Expression Engine does not make this an easy process and we had to result to exporting the blog using RSS/XML. For more details on how to do this feel free to read this post from PHP Dev Tips

The design and style of the website was clean and simple. Social media integrations such as facebook and twitter were implemented into the site’s homepage and sidebars. This created social interaction on the site between Tracey and her readers. A simple “About” section composed by Tracey lets people have a quick inside peak at her personality. There was also a need for people to contact Tracey with regards to either blog posts or speaking opportunities which was addressed through various buttons on the site linking people to the “Contact” page. was chosen to power the sites SEO.

Overall, the site is fairly simple in design and content. It’s that simplicity that keeps users intrigued and interested, getting them to the core of the content which is the blog.

Thinking about moving your blog or website over to WordPress from another platform such as Expression Engine. We can help make this process an easier one on you. Feel free to contact us or write a comment we would be happy to help our work with you!