There’s an old saying: the cobbler’s children have no shoes. For web developers it’s usually our own website – the client’s project always comes first, and ours sits half-finished for years. This time the opposite happened: we built a webshop in which every decision, down to the smallest switch, was ours. It became vitaminlabor.hu – and, incidentally, the best reference we have ever had.
Three trades, without which no webshop succeeds
Not long ago, on the strength of a single idea, three specialists working in three completely separate fields joined forces – and out of it came “the” food supplement webshop.
Karesz is the merchant. He created the Vitalab-Natural brand back in 2015, a name that is well known both in Hungary and internationally on the supplement market. He knows what belongs on the shelf.
Álmos is the PPC and marketing specialist. An old hand: his job is to make sure there is someone to sell to – he brings the visitors in with PPC campaigns.
Sanya is the developer – that’s me. I have been building webshops since 2019, and my job is to make sure the visitor who arrives feels safe, feels at home, and comes back later.
Three fields, and without any one of them a webshop cannot succeed. Until now we had worked with all three separately. This was the first time all three sat down at the same table.
What was it like to build “my own” webshop? A lesson.
Until now I had always implemented finished client requirements. I gave my recommendations – often, and loudly – but the decision was, naturally, always the client’s. This time everything came down to my own decisions, and the goal was nothing less than the “perfect webshop”.
It wasn’t as simple as I thought.
As a client, I would have driven my own developer up the wall
I have to admit this honestly. Not because I do sloppy work for clients – but because the level of perfectionism that surfaced in me on this project would be hard to tolerate as a service provider. An enormous amount of time went into polishing the smallest settings, into shaving milliseconds off the load time, and into getting every pixel of the design into place.
On the design side I was lucky enough to have the best designer I know: Annamária Ferenczi – whom I probably drove up the wall in turn with my requests.
I got lost in the details. But I have never felt any other webshop was this much mine.
Things I had never dug into this deeply
The good thing about WordPress and its plugins is precisely that you get a huge number of solutions ready-made. This time, though, the default ready-made solutions weren’t enough for me.
Every single switch
I don’t think I have ever gone this deep into settings. I analysed every checkbox and every dropdown properly, all of it at my own “expense”. Anyone who has worked with WooCommerce knows how many hidden switches it has – and also how much a default left untouched can cost you: we wrote a separate post about the CVC setting on card payments. That extra knowledge didn’t stay with me, though: I pass it on to my clients too.
The shop’s own voice
WooCommerce’s stock strings are genuinely useful, because there is a phrase for everything and it is fine in general. But if you want something more specific than that, you have to rewrite them. And I found text almost everywhere that let me tailor the shop’s communication more closely – from cart messages to order confirmations. That took a lot of time too, and in hindsight it is one of the jobs that paid off the most.
Filters, ready for thousands of products
I also spent a lot of time perfecting the filters. There aren’t many products in the catalogue yet, but I built the structure and the speed so that it will carry thousands. This is the kind of work that is invisible at launch and saves you a complete rebuild two years later. I wrote about the filter plugin and the rest of our tried-and-tested stack in a separate post.
And the marketing tools I had only ever built to order
I’ll admit it: I had always built these only when they were ordered, since they aren’t strictly needed for a webshop to function. And yet no webshop can succeed without them. A partial list:
- popups that inform the visitor or nudge them towards a specific action
- newsletter sign-up and management
- automated follow-up emails (“how do you like the product?”)
- visual aids alongside every kind of copy
- incentives to increase cart value
- product feeds for comparison sites
None of these is just icing on the cake. These are what turn a visitor into a customer, and a customer into a returning one.
So what does the client get out of it?
This project was research and development carried out at our own expense. Every hour I spent analysing switches, rewriting copy and preparing the filters is knowledge our clients no longer have to pay for on their own projects. Next time I say in a meeting that “this is how it’s worth setting up”, it won’t be a tip read off a documentation page – it will be a decision I lived through and measured.
The second benefit is the reference itself. Not a portfolio screenshot, but a working webshop in which every decision is ours – from the speed through the copy to the filters. If someone asks how we work, it’s enough to open it.
And there is a third, the least tangible one: I now know what it is like to be the client. What it is like to be impatient about your own project, and what it is like to want everything to be perfect. That perspective, I think, is useful not only to me but to my current and future clients too.
The cobbler’s shoes got made after all
Álmos brings the visitors in with the PPC campaigns, Karesz makes sure there is something worth taking home, and my job is to assure the visitor that this is a safe, friendly and professional webshop worth coming back to.
So the cobbler’s child got shoes after all. And exactly the kind he is happy to show off.
Do you think we pulled it off? Take a look at vitaminlabor.hu and let us know what you think of it. And if you’d like to see this level of detail work on your own webshop, we’re happy to talk about that too.