Wild Olive just rocks.  They are a group of Christian women that sell original, creative tee shirts that include Bible verses in the design.  Their designs are hip and unique, and a portion of the proceeds of each of their sales go to a charity which rotates on a regular basis.  We at Green Media can’t say enough good things about them, and urge you to check them out and support them at www.wildolivetees.com.

Colleen first approached us with a problem.  As a graphic designer with some web development experience, she had already built a beautifully crafted web site that was finding commercial success.  The site had a lot of exquisitely detailed graphic design which added to the commercial appeal of the products, but the time it took to manage the web site was overwhelming.  She was building the site in Photoshop and laying out each page out individually with an HTML editor, and she had minimal ecommerce options available to her.  Because business was growing, Colleen was spending too much time dealing with tedious aspects of updating and managing her web site, and not enough time actually designing new tee shirts.  She needed to be able to add some advanced functionality like an attractive shopping cart  and a newsletter opt-in box, and she needed to be able to manage page, blog, and products easier and faster.  And just as importantly, she really wanted to keep the look and feel of the web site and it’s detailed graphic design intact.  We were really excited to have the opportunity to work with Colleen and Wild Olive, and we knew we could help.

To solve Colleen and Wild Olive’s web site design dilemmas, we set up a fresh installation of WordPress and licensed out a copy of Thesis for the web site to serve as a basis for customization and coding.  Supplied with the original graphic design development files from Wild Olive, Green Media created a graphic skin for Thesis that included a header and a footer that kept the original site design intact as well as an effect which blended the design of the web site together.  By using this design technique, we were able to maintain the original design elements of the site, and mimic its’ look and feel into other areas of the site that are visible when they become expanded due to additional content.

With WordPress installed and Thesis skinned to look like Wild Olive intended, adding additional functionality was a breeze.  Wild Olive utilizes One Shopping Cart to provide both their shopping cart and autoresponder services, in part because of the design options that One Shopping Cart provides.  Because One Shopping Cart optionally provides individual code snippets to use as a purchase button for each product, Colleen had the ability to do some extra creative things with each of her products on her web site, giving them individual pages and laying them out in a personalized way.  Each product is set up directly in One Shopping Cart, and One Shopping Cart handles the whole transaction.  A skin is also applied to One Shopping Cart to match its’ appearance to that of the rest of the web site.

Some additional functionality that they had on their old web site and wanted to maintain was a rotating Flash slideshow, which we were able to accomplish by using the NextGen Gallery plugin for WordPress.  NextGen is a free plugin that provides the ability to add image galleries and slideshows that have very cool, interesting, “Web 2.0″ effects.  Additionally, it came up during the course of discussion that the girls had an existing blogger.com blog that they were using for Wild Olive.  Because WordPress has such strong blogging capabilities, we decided it made sense to migrate the blogger.com blog into the new web site and made that change as well.

In terms of Wild Olive’s site-based marketing, they utilize their autoresponder services from One Shopping Cart to manage their mailing lists and marketing campaigns, autoresponder sequencing and timing, and opt-in forms.  Their opt-in form is positioned on their web site utilizing a text widget in the site’s main sidebar, and styled using customized CSS we built for them.

Wild Olive has found success and growth since the launch of their revamped, WordPress-based web site in April of 2009, receiving several spikes in traffic May and June, and showing general continual growth.  Proving it’s flexibility and usefulness during the first of these spikes, WordPress responded beautifully when Green Media installed a content caching plugin that significantly speeds the web site up during times of high volume traffic, effectively “Slash Dot”-proofing the site.  Wild Olive currently hosts their web site and email services with Green Media Hosting and uses us for ongoing technical assistance, as needed web development and miscellaneous support.