Online store for “Zimushka”.

Background

“Zimushka” is a fur headwear shop from Pyatigorsk: hats, berets, fur-trimmed scarves and snoods made of mink, knitted mink and arctic fox. The seller is a sole trader who ships orders across Russia and the CIS. They came to us for a turnkey online store: the old Joomla site was outdated and did not let the owner manage the range themselves.

What we started with:

• 161 products in 13 categories: half of them with sizes, many models in several colours;
• an old site with URLs like /katalog/…html that search engines and customers already knew;
• trading terms that had to be shown honestly: payment on delivery for orders up to ₽20,000, free delivery from ₽50,000, a size chart, fur care;
• an owner who would run the shop themselves — without a programmer and without knowing WordPress.

The task: build everything from scratch — design, front-end, catalogue, cart and checkout, an owner-friendly admin panel — and launch on the live domain. Deadline: two weeks.

How we worked

The project was built in two weeks by a team of a designer, a programmer and a front-end developer. The platform is WordPress 7 + WooCommerce 11; the theme was written from scratch for this shop, with no ready-made templates or page builders.

The order of work:

• analysed the range: product types, fur, colours, lines, sizes — this grew into the structure of the catalogue and filters;
• created the design system and the home page, then the catalogue, product page, cart and checkout;
• migrated 161 products with 379 photographs, the pages and the delivery and payment terms;
• built the owner-friendly admin panel, redirects from the old URLs, the sitemap and basic SEO;
• moved the site to the client's domain, issued an SSL certificate and opened it to search engines.

Design: paper and charcoal

The client's references were shops in an editorial-layout spirit: cream paper, a condensed black grotesque across the full spread, monospaced captions with section numbers. We moved away from a colour palette: the background is paper, the accent is black, and the only colour on the page comes from the fur.

What the visual language is made of:

• Three typefaces, each with its own job: Oswald in capitals for headings and the wordmark, Onest for the interface and body text, JetBrains Mono for the utility layer: section numbers, breadcrumbs, prices and the fur type on product cards.
• The “ZIMUSHKA” logo is a vector taken from the outlines of the same Oswald used in the headings; the site icon is the Cyrillic letter “З” from the same typeface.
• Full-width blocks from edge to edge, hairline rules instead of panels with shadows, almost no rounded corners.
• Glass effects on the sticky header, the buttons over photos and the filter panel.
• Motion: blocks fading in, marquees, counters and snow on the page — all of it switches off under prefers-reduced-motion.

Catalogue and product page

The catalogue can be filtered by fur, product type, colour, size, labels and price — the filters run on the server, so every combination has its own URL that can be sent to a customer or opened from search. A sticky panel above the grid shows the applied filters as chips.

The product page has a filmstrip of shots with full-screen viewing and 2x zoom, the model's colours, sizes as WooCommerce variations, a “fur close-up”, similar models and a bottom purchase bar that stays in view while scrolling. Quick view opens the product page straight from the listing.

The cart and checkout are custom, in the style of the site, but the order created is a real one, in WooCommerce: the owner sees it in the admin panel with its status, delivery and payment method, and a “new order” e-mail goes to the shop's mailbox. A “call me back” request can be left from the contacts page and from the header.

An admin panel for the owner

The standard WooCommerce admin panel is overloaded with settings where it is easy to break something. We created a separate “shop manager” role and a menu of its own: orders with a new-order counter, products, home page, shop settings, pages, instructions.

Instead of WooCommerce tabs, the product card in the admin panel got a “hat properties” block: sizes, price, old price for a discount, “new / bestseller / sale” labels, type, fur, colour, line. Several sizes automatically make the product variable, one size makes it simple. In “shop settings” the owner edits contacts, messengers, delivery and payment terms, the order e-mail and company details — and they are inserted into documents and the footer automatically. The home page can be edited too: the photos and text of the first screen, the category tiles, “about us”, the gallery.

Migration, speed and SEO

The old URLs were not lost: 119 URLs from the previous site, taken from the web archive, lead to the right pages on the new one. The sitemap, robots.txt, page titles and descriptions, schema.org markup for the shop, products and breadcrumbs — everything is ready for indexing from day one.

On speed: the home page opens in 0.8 s instead of 2.5, the catalogue in 1.4 s instead of 3.7. The slow pages were caused by a database query for every product — now attributes and meta are read in a single query. Everything unnecessary from WordPress was removed from the template: jQuery, emoji, WooCommerce scripts — the theme runs on its own queries.

The site was tested end to end as a customer: a crawl of 400 pages with no broken links, a test order with size and delivery, a call-back request, search and filters, the menu on a phone, no errors in the console.

Result

In two weeks “Zimushka” received a turnkey online store at zimavita.ru: 161 products, 13 categories, filters, a cart with real orders, and an admin panel in which the owner manages products, orders and the home page without a programmer.

The result: the shop is launched on the live domain with SSL, open to search engines, the old URLs redirect to the new ones, and pages load three times faster than on the first build.