Simply Soul

Simply Soul are a record shop who have been in the music business since 1996. They pride themselves on providing the latest releases as well as collectors editions in the soul, jazz and RnB genres.

The Brief

As a growing company, the time had come for Simply Soul to modernise the look and feel of the site, improve the user experience and bring new functionality to their visitors. The timing was perfect, as the WordPress theme being used by the site was no longer supported, increasing the risk of site errors and display issues. So as well as improving the site experience and developing functionality, we took the opportunity to build a bespoke theme, built on CodyFrame.

It was of paramount importance to ensure the look and feel stayed true to the styles of soul music.

Future proofed WordPress Theme

The WordPress theme used by the existing site was to be no longer supported by the original author. As this increases the risk of site errors and display issues, it was important to implement a new theme which would be supported for years to come. We took the opportunity to build a bespoke theme, built on CodyFrame. We built the core pages for Simply Soul, and provided a set of reusable blocks which Simply Soul could use to edit the site themselves, without development skills.

Advanced Product Page

There is a lot of information that can be included when it comes to music purchases. The challenge is to make sure that all the information is included in a way that users can easily digest.

Along with descriptions being added to each product page, we also needed to give them the ability to include videos, helping to advance the experience for users.

Simply Soul also wanted to give their customers the ability to sample each record before purchasing. With each track having a brief sample that can be played from the product page. We also included the ability for samples to be played directly from the listings page, allowing customers to discover great new sounds easily and sample tracks that they otherwise might not have looked for.

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If your WordPress or WooCommerce site hasn’t been built to adhere to best practices or isn’t being maintained correctly, it’s likely to suffer from some or all of the below symptoms.

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→ Consistently crashes for no apparent reason
→ Poor performance – website loads slowly
→ Security holes – website was hacked
→ SEO issues – website not performing well in search engines
→ Deployment of new features leads to bugs appearing across the site
→ Editing content in the admin takes a long time

Integrated audio player

With a love of music at the heart of this project, Simply Soul wanted to bring music into the shopping experience. Any place on site where a music product can be viewed, there is the option to listen to preview of the music while browsing. The integrated music player sits neatly at the bottom of the page so it can play while the customer browses. From within the audio player, they also have the option to view other tracks from the same product, as well as pause, play, skip track, skip ahead in the track and control the volume. All of which greatly enhances the shopping experience.

Refined Colour Palette

Too many different colours being used can quickly make a site look messy, it can reduce accessibility and make it harder for users to navigate through an online store.

To help give the site a clean and crisp look we reduced their busy colour palette to make sure that there was a great sense of consistency throughout.

Improved Accessibility

Accessibility is so important when it comes to modern web design, it may be a requirement to score highly on Google rankings but it also helps to convert site visitors into paying customers. So by keeping this at the core of everything we design we delivered an easy to navigate site which helped to improve Simply Souls online sales.

Pre-order and re-order system

Simply Soul do a great job of letting customers know when the latest music is about to be released. So Kanuka Digital built a pre-order system to allow future releases to be made visible and pre-ordered by customers ahead of release. The account area also included a helpful ‘re-order’ option, to allow the re-ordering of previous purchases.

Seamless migration

As this was a site relaunch, it was critical to ensure that all product data from the original site was transferred smoothly to the new site. In particular, with so many music products having audio samples attached, migrating this system needed to be done with extreme care.

And of course as part of the migration process, it was critical to ensure we fully mobile optimised the site and implemented Stripe in the checkout process for a smooth checkout flow.

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