About the client:
Fetaccompli is a community bringing together cheese-lovers from around the world – where you can rate, review & discover cheese. A project created by Cheese-lover Leo Philips.
About the project:
To launch Leo’s idea, he had previously created a WordPress-based portal using a large number of off-the-shelf WordPress plugins. However, some of the plugins were conflicting, the website was slow, and the portal wasn’t giving visitors the right experience that Leo wants for them.
Having had a conversation with WP Doctors, we suggested a bespoke WordPress-based portal build. By building the portal from scratch, we removed the need for approximately 30+ WordPress plugins which gave a very significant speed boost to the website. Furthermore, we could craft key elements of the website with bespoke code that gave the exact experience to visitors that Leo was looking for.
The Project Requirements
- 1. Create a fast-loading searchable database of Cheeses
- 2. Give visitors the ability to rate and review cheeses. This is a key element of the whole website to collect cheese reviews and ratings.
- 3. Make it easy for visitors to register and login, so that the reviews can easily be collected.
- 4. Add a ‘My Cheeseboard’ feature so that visitors can ‘favourite’ any cheeses they like.
Requirement 1 – Create a fast-loading searchable database of Cheeses
With nearly 1000 cheeses (so far) on the website, it needs to be super-easy for visitors to find, discover and read about new cheeses. With custom code to import cheeses via CSV files, as well as many ways to categorise each cheese (region of manufacture, producer details, retailer details, milk type, and several dietary factors).
We’ve used a variety of methods to ensure that pages are fast loading. (This includes using several caching layers, efficiently loaded code, as well as code to optimise images as they’re uploaded to reduce administrative effort).
As the website has been built from the ground-up using bespoke WP Doctors business portal code, we immediately replaced the need for approximately 30+ WordPress plugins that were used in the prototype. This means that the website loads significantly more quickly compared to the prototype. The portal only loads the code it needs and nothing more.
Requirement 2 – Give visitors the ability to rate and review cheeses
A key feature of the website is encouraging visitors to rate and review their favourite cheeses. Using a bespoke data collection form, plenty of information about the cheese is being collected. This information can then be used to further enrich the website with new ways to discover similar cheeses at a later stage.
When a visitor sends in their review, the review is marked as pending and the admin team are notified. The reviews can then be checked and approved from within the WordPress area (and a link from the notification email).
This has all been custom-coded to make it simple and quick to check incoming reviews before approving them.
Requirement 3 – Make it easy to register and login
Before adding a cheese to ‘My Cheeseboard’ or a review can be left for a cheese, a visitor needs to register for an account. Leo wanted to make this really obvious by prompting visitors to login or register when they try to take an action such as reviewing a cheese.
We created a restriction that reviews require a login. And when clicking on links, a modal box popups asking for the visitor to register or login. Whilst simple in implementation, it creates a very intuitive interface that encourages visitors to take action.
Requirement 4 – Implement the ‘My Cheeseboard’ capability…
Leo had a particularly smart idea of creating a ‘Cheeseboard’ of favourite visitor cheeses. This feature can be used to collect information about favourite cheeses. This can be used in the future in a similar way to streaming services like Netflix to suggest other ideas based on the data that’s been collected.
In the future, this feature might be the basis for deals with cheese producers and suppliers and being able to recommend cheese deals to visitors based on their selections.
In Conclusion
We very much enjoyed working on this project as we got to focus a lot of attention on creating a fast-loading portal, whilst ensuring the management of cheese products and their associated reviews was as simple as possible for Leo and his team.
What Leo had to say…
Although I have the skills to put websites together myself, I find it frustrating as it takes such a long time so I approached Dan at WordPress Doctors as I wanted a solid foundation building without the stress of doing it myself.
When I was looking for a developer I asked for recommendations and Dan's name came up on several occasions as being one of the best in the business and, having worked with him, I now know why!
Dan was able to take the ideas buzzing around my head and turn them into something that could be brought to life...no easy feat! His patience and structured approach made the process smooth and relatively pain-free. Dan's a very genuine and warm guy whose personality and values shine through, he makes valuable and considered suggestions to ensure you get the most appropriate site for your needs. I now have a site that is structured in a way that it can grow with my business.