Prior to the completion of the rebuild in late 2020, we had previously worked with ACRES to bring their original site to the finish line via our Coding Support services. With the old site, we helped provide various functions to make their preserves listing more user friendly, automatically link blog posts to their corresponding preserve (where applicable) and more.

However, by late 2020, WordPress updates and changes had made it so that the old theme (a purchased theme) was beginning to throw javascript errors due to WordPress updating to a more modern version of jQuery. Thus, it became clear that it was time for a rebuild. Our approach was to find an attractive HTML template that could serve as the base for the creation of a new, clean WordPress theme that used as few plugins as possible. We created a theme that would provide a page builder using “blocks”; that is, various sections of the HTML theme would be made available for them to choose from, letting them build any page with attractive elements quickly and easily.

The biggest challenge was in maintaining all of their old content. About half of this content was built using the WordPress Gutenberg Block editor, and the other half (custom post types for their preserves) was built using a combination of the classic editor with custom fields provided by the former theme. Fortunately we were able to preserve all of this data, and provide them with the choice of using the block editor of our creation, or the original Gutenberg editor. This made the transition much smoother, as they were able to rebuild the old pages over time.

Our partner OmegaSkiller helped with many of the blocks, as well a few set page designs that didn’t use the block editor. The project was completed in January, 2021.