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Elissa Discovers
- Category Development
- Client Elissa Discovers - Publishing • Children’s Books • eCommerce
- Start Date April 01, 2025
- Handover May 29, 2025
The Challenge
Create a unique and deeply engaging website that captures the author’s playful voice and visual world, showcases the book catalog and characters, and turns readers into fans, while keeping the site lightning‑fast, simple to update, and accessible to kids, caregivers, teachers, and librarians.
Our Solution
OctoTEK delivered a story‑driven WordPress site with a handcrafted custom theme and targeted plugins, engineered responsiveness. We brought the main character to life as a scalable SVG and wired tap/hover/scroll interactions for delightful micro‑moments readers can discover. Under the hood, we built a secure, eCommerce‑enabled stack so the author can sell books and merch directly, with a checkout that feels as friendly as the story.
Highlights
- •Custom WordPress theme with author‑friendly editing and page templates.
- •Bespoke plugins to power unique interactions and content types.
- •Interactive "Sneak Peek" reader with page‑flip previews, teaser chapters, and optional audio narration.
- •Animated SVG main character that responds to user interactions (tap, hover, scroll) without heavy JS.
- •WooCommerce store for books and merch, with clean product pages, cart, and checkout.
- •Book catalog & detail pages using custom post types and taxonomies (series, age range, topics).
- •Elementor and ACF blocks for reusable layouts: hero, gallery, quote, CTA, and activity download.
- •Mobile‑first navigation with large touch targets and simplified menus.
- •Activities & downloads (coloring pages, discussion guides) with print‑friendly styles.
- •Performance at the edge via CDN, responsive images (
srcset/sizes), WebP, critical CSS, and smart caching. - •Accessibility (WCAG‑aligned contrast, focus states, skip links, ARIA landmarks, reduced‑motion).
- •Trust & safety with CAPTCHA on forms, basic rate limiting, and privacy‑minded analytics.
Tech Stack
WordPress • Custom theme (PHP/JS) • Custom plugins • WooCommerce • Elementor/ACF blocks • REST endpoints & secure webhooks • CDN edge caching • Image optimization (WebP/responsive) • Page/object caching • Form handling + CAPTCHA • Analytics & funnels • Stripe/PayPal payments (as configured)
Impact
- •Core Web Vitals in the green on mobile and desktop landing routes.
- •Time on page up 40% on Book pages with read‑a‑bit previews.
- •Search impressions up 100% with Book/Author schema and improved internal linking.
Services Provided
- •UX/UI Design
- •Front-end Development
- •Back-end Development
- •Copywriting
- •WordPress Development
- •SEO Optimization