Introduction:
Sergey is a YouTube blogger picking up an audience fast and a good friend of mine. We are still building Brutal Potion together — how its site was made is described here — but this case is about the blogger’s personal site, “Istoki”.
The site is a store for the channel’s courses and services. An order goes through on its own, with nobody driving it by hand: a subscriber does not have to send a direct message, and Sergey does not have to walk every purchase through himself.
People come to me both when they are only just starting out and when everything is already running. The second kind need a solution here and now. Sergey was the second kind.
Stage 1. Building a stopgap page.
1.1 Put up Sergey’s existing courses and insights with detailed descriptions.
1.2 Provide every available way of getting in touch to place an order.
1.3 Add the VKontakte reviews and a review slider.
To save time, I took a free template under the CC BY 3.0 licence for the stopgap version — it allows the template to be edited and used commercially.
Together with Sergey we picked the “Workshop” template by Colorlib.
We loaded in our own content, I went through the fonts and added a few blocks of my own. Five hours of work, not counting preparing the copy.
Hover or tap and the site scrolls. ⛶ — open full screen
Stage 2. Building the site.
2.1 Build the site on the WordPress CMS and the WooCommerce e-commerce plugin.
2.2 Rework the design and the markup of the existing landing page.
2.3 Lay out the Tsmok Blog products conveniently on the home page, with filtering.
2.4 Set up payment acceptance through a convenient payment system.
Sergey liked the design of the stopgap version, so I recreated the colour scheme and the main visual elements on the new engine as well.
Video published on 28 February 2022.
I redid the navigation and moved an introduction with a photo of Sergey up to the first screen — a channel’s storefront needs a face, not an abstract cover.
The products section took the longest to build. All the data is easy to edit from the WordPress admin panel.
Checkout is as simple as it gets for the user: an order is placed in three moves between the project’s pages.
Choosing a payment provider took the longest of all. We connected QiWi first, then swapped it for YooMoney — the terms turned out better. Both accept a card from any bank with no fee for the buyer.
Hover or tap and the site scrolls. ⛶ — open full screen
The site is finished by now, and Sergey updates it regularly himself.
Client feedback:
Sergey talked about the project in a separate video interview.
Video published on 17 July 2022.
For anyone who wants a look at Sergey’s site.
Go to YouTube!For anyone interested in Sergey’s Tsmok Blog channel on YouTube.