loading
Martin SawinskiI am available for contract, hire, or collaboration.

Hi, I'mMartin Sawinski

 

Download Résumé
Case Study

Loll Designs Website

Design / eCommerce / Web Design / Web Development / WordPress
ClientLoll Designs
RoleCreative Direction, Strategy, Account Management
Loll Designs storefront scrolling on desktop, tablet, and phone
✦
Proudly made in the USADurable, all-weather furniture from recycled plastic
01 Overview

A storefront stripped down to exactly what the store needs.

Loll Designs is a designer and manufacturer of durable, all-weather outdoor furniture and accessories made from recycled plastic — mostly single-use milk jugs. With thoughtful, original designs and unique materials, Loll crafts innovative, fun, high-quality products, proudly made in the USA.

Loll’s online store is its storefront, and the store had outgrown its off-the-shelf theme. I worked with Loll to strip the site down to what it actually needed — and then build exactly that.

Chartreuse Loll lounger on a lakeside dock as a swimmer cannonballs in
⟲
Recycled milk jugsMost pieces start as single-use plastic
02 The Challenge

An off-the-shelf theme, costing the store on every front.

Loll’s ecommerce site ran on a pre-built theme that offered neither the flexibility nor the performance a working store needs. Long load times mean lower conversions, and the bloat was costing Loll on every front — page speed, user experience and, ultimately, online sales:

  • The theme shipped far more code than the store used, dragging down every page load.
  • Page layouts were locked into Visual Composer, a page builder that stores content as proprietary shortcodes — disable it, and every page built with it turns to garbled text.
  • The plugin stack had grown unchecked — including one plugin that let admins, editors and authors inject raw PHP from the WordPress editor, a serious security risk.
03 The Approach

Replace the theme outright. Question every plugin.

I believe in a balance between proven plugins and custom development: never reinvent the wheel, but question every plugin a site carries. For Loll, that meant replacing the theme and page builder outright and auditing everything else.

  • Developed a fully custom theme from scratch — built to WordPress Coding Standards, documented, and optimized for exactly what the store requires, nothing more.
  • Replaced Visual Composer with Advanced Custom Fields, which saves content as native WordPress metadata — so nothing is locked to a plugin when the next redesign comes.
  • Completed a plugin audit, removing every plugin the site didn’t genuinely need — starting with the PHP-injection risk.
01
Loll homepage hero with the lounge collection
The custom theme’s homepage — the lounge collection, one call to action.
02
Loll homepage collection tiles with the recycle + relax banner
Collection tiles on the homepage — recycle + relax.
03
Loll site footer with lake photo, link columns, and the loll mark
The footer — sister companies, support links, and the loll mark.
— The payoff
Faster to load, safer to run,
cheaper to extend. Nothing the store doesn’t use.
04 The Outcome

No theme bloat between a visitor and a purchase.

Loll now runs on a lean, purpose-built store with no theme bloat standing between a visitor and a purchase. Because the custom build meets the project’s exact requirements and keeps its content in native WordPress data, it is faster to load, safer to run and cheaper to extend — saving Loll time and money in the long run.

Two white Loll chairs on black sand at the water's edge
Furniture built for all weather — sold on a store built the same way.
White Loll chairs around a fire pit on a black-sand Lake Superior shore
yo@martinsawinski.com