Kilt Agency
A WordPress custom theme for the company website and online shop
Kilt is a Portuguese management and production agency in the field of comedy.
They reached out for a full makeover of their website – both redesign but also restructure it completely based on 3 types of content they need to manage – their artists, projects and events.
Besides that, they wanted to keep their online shop.
The old version was already setup on WordPress so I started working on a fully customised theme, designed and built from scratch with 3 main things in mind:
- It should be easily managed – they needed something that could be easily updated, that allowed them to just insert content and not worry too much about structure or design;
- Dynamic connections – the artists are all connected to the agency’s projects and events, as well as the products in the shop which can be merch but also event tickets or exclusive videos;
- Keep WooCommerce – that’s what they were already using for their online shop and wanted to keep it, so the new theme was built with this in mind too;
Artists, Projects and Events
To easily manage and keep track of these different types of content, three custom post types were created with specific custom fields.
To connect all of these plus the products, the native WordPress categories system was used.
This way the blocks with that content are rendered dynamically and the client doesn’t need to insert the same content throughout different pages – it’s good for consistency and easier to manage.
So for example, when adding a new artist, the team only needs to check the corresponding projects in the categories box and that block will appear in the artist’s page but also, each project will have the artist appear in it automatically.
In the homepage, the events block will render the upcoming events first, organised by date – most recent ones first. Then the past events which will automatically have a black and white filter to separate them visually from the upcoming ones.
Special product pages
The agency has different sorts of products – from physical ones like books and apparel, to digital ones such as event tickets and video exclusives.
Up until this point, the video exclusives were not so simple to manage – the client would create a product, then a post containing the video and would manage its access with a plugin that connected both of those.
So, to make it easier and just for the video exclusives, a specific kind of product page was developed.
In the back-office all the product’s details (description and video link) are managed directly in the product page with custom fields, and in the frontend the video becomes accessible only once the user buys it through several verifications.
Responsiveness and Accessibility
The website is fully responsive and it was built to insure a11y best practices. When checked on the government accessibility scanner – https://www.acessibilidade.gov.pt/ – it scored an average of 9 points with the lowest score being around 8.3 and the best score the full 10 points.
In the end, the design and development toolbox included the following:
- WooCommerce – https://woocommerce.com/
- Advanced Custom Fields – https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/
- Owl Carousel – https://owlcarousel2.github.io/OwlCarousel2/
- Material symbols and icons – https://fonts.google.com/icons
- Figma for prototyping
Overall, this was definitely my most ambitious solo web development project for a client, where I got to work on the design, prototype and then the whole frontend and backend development. We were all in constant contact throughout the whole process, to ensure everything was according to what the team expected.
