The Mower Supastore
The Mower Supastore
The Mower Supastore is a large retail outlet for outdoor power equipment located in Brendale in Moreton Bay Region.
The store features a very large retail showroom as well as a comprehensive Spare Parts department and a fully-equipped Mower Repair Shop.
The business is one of the largest of its kind in Queensland and services home gardeners, local councils, institutions, and agricultural businesses right across South East Queensland.
The business had a functional WordPress / WooCommerce website and recently made an unsuccessful attempt to migrate this site to the Shopify platform.
I was commissioned to “fix the website”. After some meetings with the owners, I proposed to re-establish the site on the WordPress / WooCommerce platform and to get a site live as quickly as possibly …even if the work was not totally finished.
The new website is now operational, but there is still much work yet to do before it could be considered to be finished.
This article will be something of a journal of an on-going project. I’ll attempt to explain each of the major steps in the process, including: the initial website build; the integration of services such as Google Business Profile, Bing Places for Business, Google Shopping and Google Ads; and the integration of the site with the Sprokit point of sale system.
Kadence WP
As with every site that I have built in the past year or two, this site was built using the Kadence WP suite of tools. I have been so impressed with the quality of these tools that I have invested in the Lifetime Full Bundle which gives me access to every product presently in the suite … and every new product that is developed in the future.
Since my initial investment, there have been many major updates to the suite. In the very near future, I will be beta-testing Kadence AI, and exciting new product which will massively upgrade the present Design Library.
The Mower Supastore site was built on the Kadence Theme to which I added the Kadence Theme Pro thus extending the capabilities to include:
- Header Add-ons – to enable more functional headers
- Hooked Elements – probably my favourite feature of the Kadence suite …the ability to hook custom elements into pages, posts, archives, and almost anywhere else on the site
- Ultimate Menu – facility to add mega menus to give visitors a better overall view of a site’s layout
- WooCommerce Integration – adds extra WooCommerce customizations into the Customizer.
- …. and more
My initial interest in the Kadence suite was sparked by Kadence Blocks, the free set of tools used to build sites in the WordPress native editor called Gutenberg. I was interested to see whether this would be a possible replacement for Elementor which had been my builder of choice.
Kadence Blocks has recently had a substantial upgade to version 3 and I have used this version along with Kadence Blocks Pro, the professional extensions.
I have also used Kadence Shop Kit to create custom WooCommerce layouts – the single product layout and various product archives …including an archive of the most important brands.
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 the WordPress native editor and Kadence Blocks using 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 |
