02-Dec-2013

Country Road RV

Country Road RV specialise in selling high quality accessories and components for Recreational Vehicle (RV) and motor-home owners.

The site needed to be clean and easy to read on mobile devices. Products need to be added easily along with their photos.

Redevelopments Over The Years

About 12 months after I finished the website I got a request to hand it over to another developer. Over the years it has moved to at least five different companies or developers, each a backward step as none use an e-commerce component. I can only assume the owner could not cope with Woo-commerce and sought an easier and probably a cheaper solution.

Many versions were not responsive to mobile phones and would have missed out on searches from mobile users. The original site was fully responsive.

Some of the photos I took have remained and it's good to see that my chair illustration is still in use, and on the front page no less.

The swivel seat. The only remainder of my contribution to Country Road RV.

The site can be viewed by going to https://www.countryroadrv.com.au/.

Choosing an eCommerce Package

Country Road RV's home page.
Country Road RV's home page.

For the selling side of the site I considered using WP e-Commerce by Getshopped, but I wasn't that impressed with it so I thought I would give the well known Woo-commerce a try. Woo-commerce also comes with it's own templates and for this one I chose Artificer from WooThemes for this build. Ultimatum also caters to Woo-commerce, but the Artificer suited the look wanted for Country Road RV.

The Artificer theme is basic and (mostly) easy to use. It is responsive; that is, it will adapt on its own to the narrow screen of mobile phones and tablets. These devices are becoming more popular for web browsing and it's a good idea to keep those users in mind when designing sites.

Product Display

A typical Woocommerce product display.
A typical Woo-commerce product display.

One of the annoyances of Woo-commerce is that you don't have much control over how the products are displayed.

Looking at the screen shot from the site there is a large vacant space above the "Product Description". This is one space I would like to used better. I need to research Woo-commerce more before making changes. I have just completed another site and with a completely different theme and it has the same problem, or feature maybe!

I found instructions that you need to override /wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/templates/content-product.php.

Overriding Woo-commerce

To override Woo-commerce in this example copy the above file to: /[your_theme]/woocommerce/content-product.php

Woo-commerce uses hooks to display the content. A list of hooks can be found here.

Make sure all changes you make are tested before releasing onto your users.

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