Blacklock Jewellery

Disappointed with the lack of control over his existing site – which used a proprietary solution with content changes managed by an agency – Chris Blacklock of Blacklock Jewellery contacted me with the clear goal of giving his business complete control of content with a fast and easy-to-use interface.

I built a responsive, SEO-optimised, completely bespoke WordPress theme based on the client’s design specifications, fully integrating the new Gutenberg block editor to give him a greater level of flexibility to add, change or remove content. I created custom styles for standard Gutenberg blocks while modifying the output of certain standard blocks to give a more tailored experience – along with creating a very lightweight slider based on Gutenberg cover blocks in order to reduce reliance on third-party plugins and to keep the editing interface as standard as possible.

WooCommerce was implemented as the e-commerce solution, but due to the high-quality nature of the products a much more premium feel was necessary to do them justice, so we heavily customised the WooCommerce checkout experience to better reflect this. To make it easy for the client to add products without having to manually set up the blocks themselves, I integrated Gutenberg into the WooCommerce products post type and added a default custom block template.

Finally, I integrated the Klarna payment gateway to give the client the option of offering a wide range of payment options including interest-free instalments and three-year finance, along with the ability for promotional messaging for products between established price points.

All in all, I believe this project to be a huge success – the transfer of control over content empowered the client, while in the two weeks following the site relaunch, traffic was up over 200% while bounce rate improved, falling over 13%.