Scope

Directional Drills is another WordPress driven custom theme build for a local heavy machinery and equipment broker. The main drive behind developing this project was to help a frustrated business owner who couldn’t get previous developers deliver him a site after months of wasting his time. Knowing was burn out can do to client’s desire to trust again has forced me to assume a pro-active position in order to prevent a negative experience.

From the get-go, I set up expectations for design, process, functional capabilities and was able to earn client’s trust. We’ve explored his main competition and despite similar brand colors, products and industry, have been able to put together a look and feel that is distinct from competition yet modern and appealing.

Main challenge was to build a variety of similar product listings that break up into categories and have specific custom meta data that is filterable on the website. The other challenge was to allow for guest submission while allowing registered users to edit their previous listings. And one last final requirement was to allow simple administration and management of listings, as well as the ability to transfer over 400 existing listings from an old database.

To pull off this gig in quick times, I relied on several plugins like Elementor, FacetWP, Relevansi, Gravity Forms, WP Import and few others. I prefer not to use plugins when possible, but sometimes extending particular functionality myself is simply not cost-practical. I’ve constructed simple PHP queries to format data from old DB into a table. Using WP Import, CSV and mapping of fields, I moved over 400 listings including featured images into the new WordPress Database.