Covies Cebu Website

COVIES is: “Cebu Ocean View International English School.”

In the 2016 spring semester at GPA high school, I introduced myself to one of my new coworkers and after talking for a while, found out that he is one of the co-owners of this English school in the Philippines. He said they were trying to do a greater marketing push to recruit students in the upcoming months and asked if I could help them create a more professional looking website.

You can see the first edition of the website in Wix below (it’s the only cached version of the former website on the Internet Archive):

covies-old

The Design

I agreed to help and set about choosing a theme that would be clean, simple, and professional, while also being able to showcase photography of their school.

I settled on the Activello theme and created a child theme (available on GitHub) for extra functionality and some customizations we wanted. Both are pictured below:

A few of the notable additions to the custom theme include:

  1. A left floating logo in the header (Activello’s logo sits above the title or replaces it)
  2. Removed the text from the front page slider
  3. Increased the number of slides I could use on the slider
  4. Added a social menu in the top bar in place of Search
  5. Additionally, added an AirBnB type “bed” icon to the available social menu icons
  6. Changed the default color to the blues seen above
  7. Allowed custom HTML code in the footer (not just plain text) – so we can style it
  8. Added responsive styles for the logo
  9. Added the word “MENU” under the mobile hamburger bars menu to make it clearer what that icon stands for
  10. Disabled JetPack meta information for Gallery images

The Process

Unfortunately, with Wix, there is no convenient “Export” tool to remove Posts or Files from the site to easily transfer a site off of that service. So… I had to:

  1. Manually go in and download every single image file (and PDF, PPT, etc) one by one to my hard drive
  2. Then, I had to go in to every single page and copy-paste the pre-existing text from there into a document I had open
  3. I created all new Posts and Pages in WordPress and copy-pasted all the text from the document into appropriate articles
  4. I uploaded all the Media and added those to the appropriate pages
  5. And, I customized the Theme Options, added Plugins, and so-on

I initially built the entire site as a subsite on one of my WordPress Multisite installations so that the original site could stay “up” while I worked. Then, I requested a transfer away from Wix and put the site up in Dreamhost (affiliate link from my hosting provider).

The end result is what you see below. A much more professional looking website:

covies-new

Visit the LIVE website at http://coviescebu.com

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