Responsive Website Design for Knitting Company

Knitting Pure and Simple is a local Truckee company formed by knitter and designer Diane Soucy. Diane has been selling her knitting patterns worldwide for years. Her previous site was an html 1.0 website built in the early 2000’s and provided her limited flexibility. She needed a new website with eCommerce functionality, search engine optimization, and incredible search options that could help her not only get her new patterns and updates to her followers, but could help her compete with other online designers and distributors.

The site began months prior when we were hired to help Diane reformat all of her existing patterns into a branded template and ultimately in pdf format. These pattens could then be sold and downloaded as pdf’s through online distributors. Once those were successfully selling, the need for a website redesign was imperative.

Since Diane had already worked with us and knew how we could help her, she trusted us with our recommendations during the planning stages. Therefore, the site project really started with search engine optimization. We started doing some keyword analysis to see what people who were looking for knitting patterns were really using to search. Once we had that data, we compared it to what competitors were using those keyword phrases and which had little or no usage (i.e. those words being searched AND with little competition are ones that can help Diane’s Google rankings). Then we took those optimal keyword phrases to rebuild Diane’s site navigation and built her into a WordPress eCommerce platform.

Diane already had over 1000+ storefront retailers selling her patterns so wanted to do something online that would only promote those retailers and would maintain a good relationship with each of them. Using Google’s map API, we programmed a map that could show all 1000+ retail locations worldwide AND search and find options all done via zip code. Additionally, we added her 50+ patterns with those optimized keyword phrases so that the patterns could be searched per category and could be found via Google searches. Diane wanted to keep her sales routing through an online retailer versus through her site so we programmed each pattern to be directly linked, purchased and downloaded to the pattern hosted off-site.

The site itself is a great site that not only incorporates on-page search engine optimization and pattern searching capability, but is user-friendly, allows for most recent patterns to appear on the first page, allows for coupon codes and discounts, a rotating slider per season, has a blog and rss feed, was built in a development site and once tested, was launched successfully on a more up-to-date host, has a backup system integrated, and is built in current web-standards that can be seen in major browsers and mobile devices. Visit her site at: KnittingPureandSimple.com