The Father’s Table Website: Technical Implementation

The Brief

The Father’s Table is a nation-wide and privately owned dessert manufacturer based out of the Central Florida region. Their retail product line includes a wide variety of cheesecakes, cake rolls and seasonally featured variations of the like. Additionally, the company offers a full line of  kid-approved food items for grade school.

Their original website design was not user-friendly, especially in regards to navigating to specific products and finding that product’s information. Their audience struggled to locate the kind of information or product they were looking for, such as product images, nutritional and packaging information, etc.

The Challenge

Apexon’s Digital Experience team was tasked with a goal to design a website that would better speak to The Father’s Table brand and values, improve information architecture, and develop a system to manage their product inventory.

The manual process that was originally used forced the company’s brokers to communicate every single one of their needs and wait for those materials to be delivered to them, meaning if there were any misunderstandings or new material needed, the process needed to be repeated.

The goal was to increase visits to their site in a way that proved the product’s value to the customer and data value to the brokers.

The Solution

WordPress was the platform of choice to be leveraged as a content management system (CMS). The Father’s Table had been previously using WordPress and, given the scope and budget, there was no reason to deviate from it. The problem was not using the platform to its full capabilities.

One of WordPress’ biggest benefits is its no-code Gutenberg block editor which provides a set of UI content blocks to help transform your pages and posts. However, one of its biggest limitations is its lack of live preview editing. Without having to publish a draft, there’s no way to preview, in real-time, how your layout will display within the selected theme.

Elementor solves that pain point by providing an interactive user interface to customize any page or post with real-time preview capabilities. It also provides an intuitive editor where you can manage layout, styles and choose from an extended set of widgets to embed into your design.

The Results

Custom Post Types

WordPress has evolved quite a bit since it’s inception as a blogging platform. Custom post types are content types like pages and posts. Some other types include menus, revisions and attachments. These allow for full flexibility in creating a wide variety of content. In order to provide a user interface to manage these types, Custom Post Type UI plugin was installed.

In the case of Father’s Table a custom post type for products was required in order to properly manage their full inventory of food items. Next we needed to determine the set of attributes for each product. Below are the schemas used for products and product varieties.

A product variety is just a variation of a particular product.  For example, A 16oz cheesecake product can contain several varieties such as New York Style, Brownie, Red Velvet and Strawberry Swirl.