The Bass Place Redesign

The design

This site was inspired by the wood grain patterns on some of the basses in the Bass Place’s shop. The store owner wanted something dark and rich that felt like a guitar store.
Since this store is unique, I wanted to give it the specialty shop feel to differentiate it from other online music retailers who have a more one-size-fits-all design. I am particularly proud of some of the little accents like the drop down menus and the fact that the background repeats seamlessly.

Measurable success

Since launching this site, The Bass Place has increased their overall site traffic by about 20%. This is primarily due to some optimization techniques that are possible with this new software, like automatic URL rewriting, google base integration, and better sitemap construction compared to their old ecommerce solution.

Under the hood

This site was built on Zen Cart ecommerce software. I like this solution because it is very configurable, it’s open source PHP/mySQL, and it has a good support community. It took a bit of wrangling to get it to work the way I wanted, but everyone involved is happy with the end result.

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