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GoPole.com

  • Challenge

    Create an ecommerce site that reflects GoPole’s unique brand, connects with their audience, and keeps pace with their rapid organizational growth.

  • Solution

    Build with the extreme sports enthusiast in mind: convey the functionality and adaptability of GoPole products through an engaging and demonstrative shopping experience.

  • Results

    A responsive and animation-rich ecommerce site built on a combination of Craft and Shopify that led to a 68% growth in pageviews and improved engagement among both desktop and mobile visitors.

GoPole’s products are built for adventure. GoPole’s custom accessories for the GoPro camera are designed for extreme sports enthusiasts who want to record their gnarliest jumps, dives, and barrels. With an enviable collection of crowd-sourced photography that shows off their products in action, it became our mission to translate those images into a photo-forward, animation-rich website.

FRONT-END DEVELOPMENT

Handling Heavy Photo Content

An early review of site analytics revealed that while ⅓ of visits were coming from mobile devices, users were also engaging heavily with photography. To create a photo-heavy site that performed well on mobile, the team made handling image swapping for smaller viewports a priority. When we couldn’t find the right image-handling tool for the task, we ended up writing our own.

INTERACTIVE DESIGN

Seeing Products In Action

To really understand GoPole’s products you need to see them move. Close collaboration between our UX, Design, and Front-End team members inspired a solution that creates a unique interactive feature: a set of animation modules within Craft that can be applied to any product image to create a motion effect.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

A Craft & Shopify Hybrid

Craft gave us the flexibility GoPole needed to support a growing brand and site, but it lacked the necessary shopping features. To solve this problem we wrote our own Craft/Shopify plug-in. We built ecommerce pages on Shopify and leveraged the Shopify API to integrate them into Craft.

Summary

We were able to successfully deliver a fully responsive site that features product pages and animations that appear custom-created, but are actually built on a CMS that GoPole can update and expand. We were excited to deliver an ecommerce site that doesn’t immediately jump into a online catalog format, but rather creates a unique experience on every page that caters perfectly to GoPole’s curious and fun-loving audience.