Saturday, November 28th, 2009

I just wrapped up work on a new web site for Colette Patterns, a independent sewing pattern designer in Portland, Oregon (who also happens to be my wife).

About Colette Patterns

From the Colette Patterns about page:

Colette Patterns’ mission is to help you create clothing that feels both beautiful and personal. While it’s all too easy to find cheap, cute, disposable clothing meant to be worn for weeks or months and then discarded, making your own clothing is an entirely different experience. It’s something cherished, something chosen, something entirely you.

About the project

In order to easily incorporate the blog on the old Colette Patterns site, this site was built entirely on Wordpress. Working from the designs provided, I created a Wordpress theme from scratch and integrated the Shopp ecommerce plugin to run the store. Customers are given the choice of buying via Paypal or a secure on-site checkout using Authorize.net.

Shopp is a great choice for anyone needing to add ecommerce onto a Wordpress site. I chose it over the other options in this area due to the well designed API and clearly written documentation. The store pages are heavily modified versions of the Shopp defaults.

The front end is valid XHTML and CSS, except in a couple spots where invalid markup is generated by backend plugins. All JavaScript on the site was written using jQuery.