The client
picturestopaint.com, is a small studio of artists located in Bulgaria that hired us to completely rework their old website built on WordPress.
The site suffered from multiple issues, such as stuttering, overlapping elements, extremely slow speed and generally unpleasant and unoptimized mobile experience. A grand issue if more than 70% of your customers order from mobile devices.
Given the e-commerce nature of the business, the client’s requirements for an admin panel and the delivery time of 21 days, we opted for an entirely new and customized website in Shopify as fixing the old one would have been exponentially more expensive.
Requirements
As this was an already active business, there were some precise requirements to be followed.
The landing page must show the main three steps of the ordering process and include customer testimonials.
The order process must be split into separate steps.
Customers must be able to pay only 20% of the price as a deposit.
A gallery page was needed for the completed paintings, as well as a A How it Works page and a Pricing page where clients can easily overview the various pricing options.
Other than that, we were given complete creative freedom to deliver the website, branding and logo we deemed necessary for the business to look trustworthy on the modern digital marketplace.
Logo
The main business activity of picturestopaint was that clients can turn any picture, or a mix of pictures, they had into a full-seized painting in various styles and even add a frame to it, if desired. As such, the logo needed to represent this idea thoroughly, yet differ from the typical Palette Logos found on almost every competitor site.
The logo also needed to be easily modifiable for various sizes, such as for their Instagram channel. This is why we went simpler. Much simpler.
A black, portrait sized, rectangle, representing the frame of the painting. A splash of paint in the middle of it to represent the act and the name PicturesToPaint going outside the frame to signify for a creative process that goes “outside the box”.
Branding
The color palette for the logo and the website were closely tied with the main type of paintings sold by the business. Human Portraits. This nudged us in the direction to use natural, reassuring and lightweight nuances of beige and pink. Lighter tones for the logo and any highlighted elements. Darker tones for the CTAs and any other significant points of importance.
Finally, we created a custom image filter for all product and category images in order to give potential customers the ability to easily observe the differences in brush strokes between painting styles.
Landing
Spacious and straightforward. The landing page’s first impression is guided by an animated example of how a photo can be turned into a framed painting with the motto of the business beside or below it, depending on the screen size.
The intro is followed by the three main steps users will need to go through in order to make a purchase, each with their own customized section.
The landing ends with a highlighted area containing the value proposition of the business, followed by a large Testimonials section and a short Contact Us banner.
While we had complete freedom in the design, all text elements and logic behind the sections were communicated with both the clients and the copywriter they worked with to ensure the new website stays true to the nature of the business.
The intro is followed by the three main steps users will need to go through in order to make a purchase, each with their own customized section.
The landing ends with a highlighted area containing the value proposition of the business, followed by a large Testimonials section and a short Contact Us banner.
While we had complete freedom in the design, all text elements and logic behind the sections were communicated with both the clients and the copywriter they worked with to ensure the new website stays true to the nature of the business.
Order Process
For a customer to begin the order process, they needed to click on any of the “Get Started” CTAs on the landing page or by clicking on the “Order Now” button, located in the header of the website.
The process itself consisted of four steps where the customers could customize their order in detail.
Interesting Additions
With the landing and order system finished and working all that remained was the simpler, informative pages. All accessed from the site’s menu. Fixed in the header of the website on Desktop and accessed through a slide-in menu on Mobile.
FAQ - we added a drawer type dropdown and placed each question on a separate drawer. Pressing on any of the questions would reveal the answer below it and automatically close the previously opened question to keep the layout clean and simple to read.
Blog - by using the pre-existing blog functionality provided by Shopify we managed to provide a truly native way to add new articles that the client can easily manage by themselves without relying on us or any other external experts.
Pricing - a table representing all possible price variations between the different painting sizes, number of subjects. We also added a simple filtering system so customers can look at the prices of each medium separately.
Gallery - a custom page written from scratch that allowed the client to access an easily manageable gallery and provided the customers with the ability to sort the images there by theme or medium. Each image is also viewable in full-screen on both desktop and mobile, with the addition of swipe based navigation for mobile devices.
Finishing Touches
Following the website’s approval by the client, we moved towards the last few details. With some quick changes to the DNS setting of the domain provider, the website was up and running in under a few hours and the old website was no more. As we opted to use Shopify, the admin panel and payment management system were all already provided by the platform with speed and security being incomparable to what the client had previously.
The final tasks before finishing the project were the addition of a Live Chat pop-up on all pages and a Cookie Consent form. By request of the client we used Tawk.to and the integration took no more than a few minutes. For the cookie consent form we installed a free app from the Shopify App Store that fully covered all GDPR requirements and allowed users to fully customize their permissions.
In the end, picturestopaint.com transformed into a truly modern e-commerce shop that placed content management and customer ease of purchase at the top of its list. With a cleaner UI and a more straightforward and informative buyer journey, the website soon saw a significant increase in its monthly average orders, with the costs for the entire project returned in the very first month.
A success story by all standards.