The Gillies Jones’s WordPress site had served them well, but it was getting increasingly difficult to maintain. It was tricky to make improvements to the shopping function of the site, and Kate was looking to simplify order processing and the technical aspects of managing a website. She also wanted to pair down the content and have more flexibility, to reflect the fact that they are a small studio with shifting priorities.

I suggested it was time to consider moving the site to Shopify, so they commissioned me to research the pros and cons. My findings were that the primary benefits were: a much more intuitive and secure checkout process; more payment options and integrations; simpifying selling abroad; having flexible “sections” so it’s easier for them to add and change pages; and less technical worries relating to technical/software updates and SSLs.

There were some pain points too of course. Mainly this was migrating the 123 products and 661 blog posts and existing gift cards to the new system, and creating all the 301 re-directs as the urls would need to change. However we found some excellent tools which helped with this, Export WP plugin and the Excelify Shopify app.

Initially we decided to keep the design as close as possible to the WordPress site, so I used the starter theme Dawn but changed the look of it entirely – adding many more templates and sections to suit the content of the original site. Then in 2024, the site was enhanced further with suggestions made by A Common Purpose, to rationalise content and structure.