ainsley.dev were tasked with modernising the existing website using a fun, family-friendly design; a transition from an off-the-shelf web package to an entirely bespoke site. Their main goal was for users to view and buy their products online with ease, and more visibility for the company’s brand presence in the e-commerce market as a whole was needed.

A design strategy was formulated to reinforce the Dec’s Pets brand. A light blue and striking pink colour scheme was implemented to invoke trust, but still reflect the playfulness of the pet marketplace. The use of modern visuals and a clear font increased the legibility of the new brand. The Dec’s Pets “paw” illustration was designed and used as a watermark to create a consistent design language.

Using WooCommerce with WordPress, a custom build was created for the new platform. Back-end services were rewritten in PHP, removing the use of any heavy plugins such as MailChimp and Stamped.IO. This drastically decreased page load time. A new plugin was also created for Dec’s Pets, Squidge , which compressed and converted images to AVIF and WebP formats. Used in conjunction with lazy loading images, this made for an extremely quick platform.