Case study Agency partner
Co-Exist Projects
Redesigning a marine conservation site, and fixing what was broken underneath it
0
Products reaching Google when I arrived
The Merchant Centre sync had never been run
319
Subscribers unblocked
Six months without a single send
- Client
- Co-Exist Projects
- Sector
- Marine conservation, nonprofit
- Services
- Design, WooCommerce, tracking and email
- Engagement
- Ongoing, through Milestone
The brief
Co-Exist Projects fund marine conservation partly through a shop. The site works, and the photography is genuinely good, but it had grown page by page rather than being designed, and the parts that ask people for money were the parts working hardest against themselves.
The job is an ongoing redesign, done page by page so nothing goes dark while it happens. It runs as a child theme on the agency’s own platform, so their updates keep applying and nothing I add blocks them.
The redesign
The header now floats transparently over the hero photograph rather than sitting in a bar above it, which is a small change that gives every page its image back. The logo and the hero video are editable fields rather than things only a developer can swap.
The shop landing page was the biggest single win. It opened on a wall of category tiles, so the first thing a visitor met was another menu rather than anything they could buy. It now leads with real products and a category filter beside them.
Beyond that: the founder pages rebuilt onto editable rows, a donations gateway, and a corporate giving page with its own enquiry route. Each one is built from row types the team can reuse, so the next page like it does not need me.
The part nobody could see
Underneath the design, three things that decide whether any of it earns anything were quietly broken.
Google Merchant Centre reported zero products synced, so nothing in the shop was eligible for Google Shopping at all. The sync step had never been run, so no product push job existed. Running it properly, once, was the whole fix.
The purchase conversion had stopped firing, so every ad was running blind. Google Listings and Ads was no longer emitting it, so I moved it into the child theme: tracking that depends on a plugin continuing to behave is not tracking. And a mailing list of 319 people who had asked to hear from them had gone six months without a send.
None of that is visible from the front end, which is exactly why it had survived a site that otherwise looked finished.
What clients say
In their words, not mine.
The level of detail and commitment Aaron brings is unmatched. From SEO to design, everything was delivered with precision and care. Our online visibility has never been better.
Aaron’s work speaks volumes. From start to finish he understood our brand and vision. The end result was a powerful, sleek website that truly reflects who we are.
Aaron built the site from scratch and it was the first time the brand actually looked like us online. He handled the design and the build end to end, and I could update it myself afterwards without going back to him every time.
We use Aaron for development we would rather not hand to a junior. The work comes back the way it was specced, on the date he said, and it goes out under our name without us having to check it twice.
Aaron set up the shop and the tracking, and explained what was worth doing and what was not. He was straight about where the money was better spent, which is not what you usually get.
