The Loose Cannons Travel Krewe
Local Tampa Bay area startup. Custom WordPress development and WooCommerce integration.
By JOE ROBERTSON
At The Silver Beard, we specialize in custom WordPress and E-Commerce website development and integrations. We also love being a part of our local Tampa Bay community. So when opportunities arise to help other Tampa Bay small businesses with their website design needs, we jump to the occasion.
One of our good friends and colleagues in the website design space reached out to us about a local startup, The Loose Cannons. They needed an e-commerce website solution for their upcoming initiative, The Loose Cannons Travel Krewe.
Now being HUGE fans of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, we were ecstatic to have the opportunity to develop a web solution for The Loose Cannons Travel Krewe.
They needed a full E-Commerce based website that allowed their customers to book and pay for travel packages easily and securely online.
After the requirements gathering and technical design phases, we decided on a WordPress based website with WooCommerce integration to meet their unique E-Commerce needs.
Choosing to go with WordPress for the website allowed us to leverage our already extensive knowledge of the platform while also providing a friendly backend to the client.
We went with a child theme development strategy sitting on top of the highly performant Hello Elementor theme. This allowed us to extend the functionality of WordPress and Hello Elementor with custom Hooks and functional overrides without the risk of blowing up the source theme.
We also leveraged integrations with WooCommerce hooks to extend the E-Commerce functionality to meet The Loose Cannon’s needs for dynamic package pricing.
This project was particularly unique because the client provided excellent designs for every webpage covering all phases of the e-commerce cart and checkout process. This made the decision to go with the Hello Elementor theme a no-brainer. Hello Elementor provides a literal blank slate to work off of. So, we fired it up with a custom child theme and began writing all of the CSS, HTML, and Elementor structures to support the custom web designs. Then we wrote custom Javascript to extend user interaction functionality and provide a smooth checkout process.
We took things a step further with custom page templates written in PHP that supported unique layouts based on the page template type assigned through the WordPress backend.
This allowed our pages to load lightning-fast by eliminating the cruft and bloat that typically comes packaged with themes.
As always, we sparingly used plugins. This helps us avoid further code bloat and website slowdowns. We only pull in the plugins that we absolutely know will benefit the website, which helps cut down on development time, allowing us to pass savings onto our clients.
We like our websites to boast blazingly fast load times that help to ensure our clients aren’t missing out on any potential conversions. Eliminating unnecessary plugins allows us to achieve those break-neck levels of speed. More times than not, the functionality of a plugin can be easily implemented with a bit of PHP, Javascript, and the strategic use of the WordPress and WooCommerce Hooks ecosystem. This not only helps to eliminate code bloat and speed bottlenecks but also drastically reduces the digital attack surface area of the website. Fewer plugins mean fewer vectors for hackers to try to exploit.
All-in-all, The Loose Cannons Travel Krewe website was a ton of fun to work on. We’re delighted to have gotten the opportunity to work with such a fun and unique concept. We look forward to seeing them grow!
Go Bucs!