I know nothing about this area, but I'm surprised the redesign improved sales by 40%.
Also, I get paying for logos and branding, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the website couldn't just be pure 90's HTML with some CSS sprinkled and google js in.
How did so much schedule / money go to "refractoring"? Were they doing back end work like integrating with the mailing list or revamping the store logic or something? Is there a big telemetry backend, maybe? (I'm actually asking why this is hard, not trying to be snarky.)
>I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the website couldn't just be pure 90's HTML with some CSS sprinkled and google js in.
Oh, how I wish it could just be 90s style HTML and CSS! I'm forever trying to get back to that.
The website is a static site, but it's built with Gridsome[0], a now-defunct Vue-based static site generator. I wanted to be able to write blog posts and documentation on the site in Markdown, and Gridsome was the easiest way I knew to do that, but in retrospect, it was a big mistake.
And there shouldn't be that much JS, but there ends up being an annoying amount for managing the shopping cart. At first, I just had buy buttons that took you directly to the Shopify checkout page. And then I added support for buying a quantity other than one. And then users kept asking for a way to support VGA, so I added VGA-to-HDMI adaptors as an optional add-on. And so a shopping cart seems like the kind of thing that shouldn't be that complicated, but there's been a lot of complexity over the years. If I had to do it over again from the very beginning, I'd have just made it a Shopify template.
>How did so much schedule / money go to "refractoring"? Were they doing back end work like integrating with the mailing list or revamping the store logic or something?
The refactoring was mixed up in the theme migration. We had a lot of code that was like `class="header-image"` and then a CSS class would add a bunch of CSS rules. They didn't like that, so they spent a lot of time rewriting the CSS to use more utility classes like `mx-1`. That way, they can change things at the theme level, and it filters down into all the elements without having to change each class. I think it was a useful refactoring, but it wasn't worth the cost at the time.
Also, I get paying for logos and branding, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the website couldn't just be pure 90's HTML with some CSS sprinkled and google js in.
How did so much schedule / money go to "refractoring"? Were they doing back end work like integrating with the mailing list or revamping the store logic or something? Is there a big telemetry backend, maybe? (I'm actually asking why this is hard, not trying to be snarky.)