“Peter is highly adept at building a proper functioning website while keeping the operating costs down. I pay very little per month for an efficient site that has all the bells and whistles.” —Dana Godfrey, Coppersmith

Client: Dana Godfrey is a coppersmith specializing in handmade copper jewelry, copper sculptures, and copper-wrapped vases.

Project Description: Rebuild the existing, traditionally built site into a content management system; enhance the site design for mobile responsiveness; and add a fully functioning shopping cart—all while maintaining the look and feel of the original site.

The Inside Scoop

Dana already had a site that he loved.

Or I rather should say, Dana already had a site design that he loved.

But as with many artists and entrepreneurs who had their sites built years ago, adding updates was a problem.

When Dana approached me about working on his site, he was painstakingly copying and pasting HTML code from a How-To document prepared by his previous site designer.

And while this may have been fine and good and all ten years ago… The days of tedious web updates are happily over.

Design Reproduction

The tricky part, of course, was faithfully keeping the original design of the old site while adding new functionality (shopping cart), and making it mobile friendly (despite having been built in the days before smart phones).

In order to add a content management system, I built the old site’s design elements into a customized WordPress theme. Fortunately, the previous site designer did a good job on the technical end of things, so adapting the framework of the old site to the new WordPress platform was much less painful than it could have been.

When it came to the cart system, I setup WooCommerce with PayPal, and used Dana’s product lineup to create categories for his online catalog.

Lastly, in order to make the site mobile responsive, I pulled out the old text-link menu, and replaced it with a standard WordPress menu bar in the color scheme of Dana’s site design. Then I just swapped the standard menu for a mobile-style “hamburger menu” once the screen size dropped too far.

Business Cards

Dana’s cards needed a pick-me-up as well, so I took the copper leaf element from his old site design, and worked it into the card layout. Then with a little Photoshop magic, I was able to smooth the image for print, meanwhile adding more of the vine elements in the lower left corner to balance the card design.

I also used a subtle gradient across the background to draw the eye up to the “C” at the beginning of the logo. All colors were adapted from the leaf design image.

My Favorite Part

Honestly, looking at all the photos of Dana’s work while building out his shopping cart system. The colors he gets out of heat-treating his copper pieces are just amazing.

See the results:
www.copperworkbydanagodfrey.com