Kraton.com
Starting from Scratch
When I started at Kraton, they had just re-started a project to completely rebuild their company website. The project had been attempted a number of times and fell through because various parties weren’t on the same page. I was hired as a graphic designer, but with my significant experience in WordPress, my opinion was asked for a handful of things, which quickly turned into me being asked to take over the project. Soon after taking over the management of the project, I was formally given the Webmaster title.
The original website was built on WordPress but was so out of date that it was barely functional. It was also built by a web developer who focused more on writing code than doing things with WordPress and plugins. This resulted in a hodge-podge of plugins, code, and structure, none of which made sense and went together.
To create a new website for Kraton, we started from scratch with a completely new build. An outside firm had been hired to build the site, and I was to provide them mockups of pages, design direction, and project management, but they were not a web-specific firm. They were a marketing firm that had some experience building WordPress sites. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of bad design and bad practices, including CSS code being written to overwrite other CSS code. When I realized what was happening, the custom CSS had grown to over 2,500 lines, and most of it wasn’t doing anything other than overriding other code! This, of course, caused major performance issues on the site, things were inconsistent, and it was impossible to track down what was causing problems.
The site went live with many of these issues, but as I tried to clean things up, I discovered more and more problems. I worked with my department VP to fire the current firm and hire a new firm to re-build the CSS and assist me in cleaning up the site so that it was consistent and followed best practices. About two months later, the site re-launched with completely cleaned-up and minimal code, plugins, styles, file organization, etc. and with a detailed knowledge base, allowing the site to be managed by any WordPress expert.
I was awarded a dotCOMM Gold award and a MarCom Platinum award in 2023 for the design of the site.
When I started at Kraton, they had just re-started a project to completely rebuild their company website. The project had been attempted a number of times and fell through because various parties weren’t on the same page. I was hired as a graphic designer, but with my significant experience in WordPress, my opinion was asked for a handful of things, which quickly turned into me being asked to take over the project. Soon after taking over the management of the project, I was formally given the Webmaster title.
The original website was built on WordPress but was so out of date that it was barely functional. It was also built by a web developer who focused more on writing code than doing things with WordPress and plugins. This resulted in a hodge-podge of plugins, code, and structure, none of which made sense and went together.
To create a new website for Kraton, we started from scratch with a completely new build. An outside firm had been hired to build the site, and I was to provide them mockups of pages, design direction, and project management, but they were not a web-specific firm. They were a marketing firm that had some experience building WordPress sites. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of bad design and bad practices, including CSS code being written to overwrite other CSS code. When I realized what was happening, the custom CSS had grown to over 2,500 lines, and most of it wasn’t doing anything other than overriding other code! This, of course, caused major performance issues on the site, things were inconsistent, and it was impossible to track down what was causing problems.
The site went live with many of these issues, but as I tried to clean things up, I discovered more and more problems. I worked with my department VP to fire the current firm and hire a new firm to re-build the CSS and assist me in cleaning up the site so that it was consistent and followed best practices. About two months later, the site re-launched with completely cleaned-up and minimal code, plugins, styles, file organization, etc. and with a detailed knowledge base, allowing the site to be managed by any WordPress expert.
I was awarded a dotCOMM Gold award and a MarCom Platinum award in 2023 for the design of the site.
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