Background
Killik Handcrafted Rum is a family run distillery based in Belgrave. They make quality Jamaican style rum and use it to make tiki cocktails in their venue.
Not only do they make rum, but they also make gin under the brand GinFinity.
With numerous products and an interesting story, of course they needed websites for Killik and GinFinity respectively.
For their needs, they required something easy to use, could link up with their Shopify store for managing products, and be easily maintainable by multiple members of staff.
In addition to ecommerce, the websites also act as an online menu for food, cocktails and tasting paddles, so it was imperative that these pages were easy to amend frequently.
Accessible and maintainable
My time at WebCrunch had me working a lot with Wordpress, and at the time I was most comfortable working within it and felt it was the best option for managing content.
As for the page layout and styling, I opted to use Elementor. It has a broad set of tools for defining global styles and creating reusable components that are easy to change.
As mentioned above, the menus and sometimes layouts needed to be altered to suit changes or promotions, and that had to be accessible for someone who was not familiar with website creation or maintenance.
With Wordpress and Elementor, the process was made easy. Multiple people can have logins to edit content and visually make necessary changes.
It was also the primary choice as I wanted the website to be easily maintainable in the future without a developer necessarily on staff.
Challenges
The main challenge in getting these sites up and running was time constraints. Covid had affected their venue opening, and when it was safe to do so there was little time to get everything ready. Elementor helped greatly with the speed of deployment, especially paired with WP Engine.
In Conclusion
The Killik and GinFinity websites were some of my first solo websites after working at WebCrunch. They also came at a time before I had really started to dig in to Javascript and JS frameworks like React. Looking back, there are a lot of things I feel I could do better, but ultimately I’m pretty content with the usability for the staff to confidently make changes.