Jungaji
Jungaji is a brand new website built to display the creative works of Jungaji, a first-nations musician and artist formerly known as Troy Brady.
Jungaji is a modern day song man who is one of only a small group of Australian First Nations fluent Gu gu Yelanji speakers and song men left in the world today.
He has been performing as musician for the past three decades and this site will progressively showcase the breadth of his musical endeavours. However, the immediate motivation to build the site has been to provide a platform for the sale of high quality prints of his paintings.
In this post, I’ll explain some of the features of this site.
- Kadence Starter Template
- Woo Commerce – ecommerce platform
- Kadence Shop Kit – optimise Woo layouts
- Kadence Elements – theme builder
- Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer –
The website is in it’s early stage of development and as other features are added to the site, this portfolio post will be updated.
Kadence Starter Template
This website build was required to be be completed quickly so that it would be available before an upcoming gallery exhibition of Jungaji’s work. This showing was at Queensland Multicultural Centre between 8th June and 31st July, 2022.
To facilitate the time limitation without sacrificing quality, I chose to use one of the Kadence Starter Templates. Fortunately, a brand new template had just been released – Woo Wall Art Template.
Using the Kadence starter templates is a great way to kick off a website project. While the final site may not initially resemble the starter template, much of the background work of setting up the Kadence Theme and the basic WooCommerce settings are already taken care of.
As the starter template is built on the Kadence Theme using Kadence Blocks, it is very convenient to quickly change the global fonts and colours to achieve the required look.
It is also reassuring to know that when other useful tools from the Kadence Bundle are added, they will be totally compatible. I have installed the Pro version of the Theme and the Blocks to be able to take advantage of the many enhancements available in these extensions. On this site, I have also used these:
- Kadence Site Kit 2.0 – beta version of software to customise WooCommerce layouts – particularly single page and archive layouts.
- Kadence Simple Share – share pages and posts to a selection of social media platforms
- Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer – custom design the emails sent from WooCommerce. (This plugin is free and should be used by anyone operating a WooCommerce store).
As the Kadence Theme and Kadence Blocks are lightweight and allow the building of sites without the use of an external page builder, the site easily meets the Google Core Web Vitals – even without significant optimisation.
WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce plugin available for the WordPress platform. It powers approximately 94% of all WordPress e-commerce sites …a total of over 5 million WooCommerce sites.
So why is it so popular?
- To begin with, it’s FREE.
- It is now owned and managed by Automattic – the company that administers WordPress. It is therefore very tightly integrated with WordPress.
- It supports 67 languages.
- It has enormous support from third-party developers with extensions available to do almost anything every needed in an e-commerce platform.
- It is well documented and has an abundance of hooks available for developers to use for customising the appearance and functionality of the layouts.
The Kadence Starter Template used for this site included the basic WooCommerce installation. I have only added one extension – the STRIPE Payment Gateway. This is a very convenient way to collect payments through a secure payment gateway.
One of disadvantages of this platform is that the “vanilla” look of WooCommerce sites makes them all easily recognisable. Enter Kadence Shop Kit.
Kadence Shop Kit
Kadence Shop Kit
Kadence Shop Kit is a suite of tools to add a deal of customisation to the WooCommerce layout templates. At the moment, these focus on the single product layout and the product archive layouts.
Kadence WooCommerce
Email Designer
Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer
Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer is one of those free utilities that should be used by every WooCommerce store owner.
Some technical aspects of the website
| Hosting | The site is hosted on the Google Platform through the Closte managed WordPress hosting application. It is a LiteSpeed server and so LiteSpeed cache and LiteSpeed image optimisation are available. |
| Content Delivery Network (CDN) | Closte delivers content through the Google Cloud CDN. |
| Theme and Page Builder | The site is built using Kadence Blocks within the Kadence Theme. |
| Image Delivery | Cloudinary |
| Backups | Along with the regular backups provided as part of the hosting platform, the site is also backed up using UpDraft Plus to the Microsoft Azure platform. |
| Domain Registration and DNS | Management of the domain name is provided through my associate site – through my reseller relationship with TPP Wholesale. DNS records are handled on the Closte platform through Google Domains. |
| Search Engine Optimisation | Rank Math, SEMRush |
