Project Overview

Originally built with a commercial theme in 2012, Calandra Center for Health and Wellness had expanded to an educational resource as well as an acupuncture and Reiki practice. Marketing and advertising had kept pace but the website had become increasingly difficult to use and adapt.

Eliminating Friction, Finding Balance

Always Open Design worked closely with site administrators and the business owner to understand the very real pain points they were experiencing. We collaboratively inventoried the tools in use, existing and upcoming content needs, and mapped customer journeys for patients and students.

This preliminary work allowed us to build out a more functional framework that could scale to meet new business demands.

• A completely refactored blog that includes dynamic filtering options for readers.
• A revised approach to selling “event products” through WooCommerce that makes use of integrations with Zoom and MailChimp to provide better customer service and a smoother experience for site editors.
• A thorough content inventory that provided us with a more user- and search-friendly site architecture. This new structure also enabled the use of breadcrumbs and more purposeful Search Engine Optimization techniques on a page by page basis.
• Custom post type for Team

Theme modernization in 2024

In 2024, business needs had shifted slightly and we also wanted to take advantage of some of the modern capabilities of the site editor in WordPress. We refactored the classic theme as a hybrid, incorporating custom patterns and template parts.

• The classic theme had 2,645 lines of CSS – as a hybrid theme we were able to reduce this to just 897 lines.

That is a significant improvement to performance made possible by using theme.json and a hybrid model.

Project Details