Redesigned ONEighty Website Launched

I’ve been hard at work on the redesign of the ONEighty NYC website for the last couple of months – and there have been a few teaser shots posted here and on my LinkedIN account. As of this week however, the website is officially live – so I wanted to take some time and walk you through what the redesign consisted off. To start, some quick background – ONEighty is an NYC based high-end car customizations shop – with a large focus on headlight work. Their site was originally fully designed using WIX (since they preferred to use that) to easily be able to modify content on their own later on down the line.

The redesign was done utilizing WordPress as a backend, with wooCommerce supplying the eCommerce functionality the new website contains. There were 3 goals for the redesigned website. First off – ONEighty needed to provide a-lot more information about the services they offer – going in-depth into the different options available for each service – and what they entail. This would help minimize the time spent answering simple emails and phone-calls. Secondly ONEighty needed a way to sell all of the products they deal with in the shop, online through their website. Lastly the new website needed to provide more information about upcoming products and innovations, appearances, and general news about where the company is headed.

So, to tackle the first goal I designed an informative and well organized services section – carefully organizing the various services into appropriate categories and subcategories. The navigation between the main categories is handled via a drop-down menu located in the main site navigation; while navigating the subcategories within each main service category is done via jQuery tabs. Custom graphics were designed for the main services page, and the home-page to bring attention to the various services offered by ONEighty.

To help take care of even more of the frequently asked questions a dedicated support page was created, listing the various questions that ONEighty frequently deals with – and provides an answer. To help keep everything on one-page while minimizing the need to scroll jQuery accordions were used to handle the display of the answers for each question.

Moving on to the next issue – eCommerce. wooCommerce was used as the backend to provide eCommerce functionality within the newly designed WordPress website. Once again, custom graphics were designed for all the different product categories and subcategories. Custom widgets were created to display the categories with available products within a left-hand sidebar on the shop pages; along with custom widgets to display new, best selling, and top rated products within the footer of the site. jQuery tabs were used to organize the product description, customer reviews, and other additional product information while minimizing the amount of screen real-estate taken up by it all. Then a jQuery slider was implemented to display various related products underneath the main product description.

This took care of the eCommerce side of things, and allowed me to focus on the next problem at hand – bringing the customer closer to ONEighty and making things a bit more personal. This is were I took a slightly more creative approach. Since WordPress is a great blogging software – I made sure to integrate a blog to allow the ONEighty staff to keep the website current and provide updated information about their latest news and upcoming innovations. From here I created a custom social page to immediately display all the posts made across all of the different social networking accounts that ONEighty runs – such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. An events page was created to showcase various upcoming community events where ONEighty would be making an appearance. A portfolio was also setup to allow various cars to be featured – with links directly to the products used on each featured car.

Feel free to check out the ONEighty feature in the portfolio to check out the original WIX website, and then head on over to http://oneightynyc.com to browse the new redesigned site.