After more than ten years online competition and tightening margins have caught up with Archer Trading.
The remaining clients were passed onto the plastics graphic designer and the business shut down. It was sad to see the business that helped launch my website design business finally shut down. The whole dry cleaning industry is facing challenges as more clothes need less dry cleaning and customers cut back on discretionary spending.
The website is now offline but it can be viewed as it was over the years at the Internet Archive.
The old WordPress version of over 8 years ago was an old design that's not responsive for viewing from a mobile phone. Twenty Seventeen, one of the themes that's installed with WordPress is fully responsive and ideal for mobile and tablet use.
A quick revamp was done using Twenty Seventeen Child. The new site looks great with the dry cleaning and laundry stock images.
The Archer Trading site was getting a bit tired, especially when compared to my later web site builds. It was decided to update it by converting it from standard HTML to WordPress; a fully CSS, PHP and JavaScript powered content management system.
Compromise 2.0 by Free WordPress Themes (appears defunct since September 2013) provided the basis for the design. Archer Trading's logo and company colour was incorporated into the header, along with the company name and tag line.
WP e-commerce provides a neat catalogue but without purchasing a Gold Shopping Cart users cannot search for products. As the owner only wants an online catalogue this will be rectified by modifying the code for the search button on the supplied front page for WordPress so that products can be searched as well as other categories of the site.
The owner can now create, edit and delete products, product categories and the Businesses For Sale and Specials sections.
Archer Trading's website was completed as a project for Certificate IV in IT (Programming and Networking). The site makes little use of CSS.
The rollover effect with the buttons is achieved by different images and JavaScript.
All product images were taken by myself. The images were enhanced with drop shadows and other effects using GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program).
A future development under way is to store the products in a MySQL database so that customers can order products online.