A nursery shop built from scratch - and kept safe, easy to run and easy to change.
Online shop · Custom theme · Care
Viculii Ltd (UK)
Built from scratch · ongoing care
Development · Care · Deployment
The film
Built from scratch, kept safe and easy to run - Viculii in just over a minute.
At a glance
For Viculii - a UK nursery brand created by parents, selling cots, cot beds and mattresses - I built the shop from scratch on a custom theme, and I keep looking after it: I made it safe, gave the owner blocks she edits herself and turned every change into a tested, reversible deploy.
01 - The problem
A growing shop that had to stay safe while it kept changing.
Viculii sells nursery furniture and mattresses across the UK from its own online shop, built on a custom theme in the brand’s gold and navy. As the shop grew, so did the list of things that had to stay safe: the platform and its plugins kept moving, its shop templates had to follow every new version, and changes still went up to the server by hand, without a clear record of what was live.
The owner runs the shop, the blog and the social channels herself. She needed to update the homepage, the awards and the “As Seen In” mentions without waiting for a developer - and to know that a plugin update or a small change would never take the checkout down.
02 - The vision
Safe first. Then easy to run, then easy to change.
Three principles drove every decision:
- Safe before anything new. The care started with an audit of the whole theme: every output escaped, forms protected, inputs cleaned, the shop templates brought up to the current version and the outside scripts replaced. Later, when a security scanner flagged a share plugin with an unpatched hole, I replaced it with share buttons built into the theme and removed the plugin.
- The owner edits, the developer builds. Homepage sections became blocks with simple fields and a live preview in the editor: the hero slider, “As Seen In”, the award badges, the latest posts and a floating contact button with a form. The editor shows the real page, with a pencil and eye switch between fields and preview.
- Every change from the code, every change reversible. A deploy is now one command: it builds a clean package, backs up the live theme, lists what will change, uploads it and keeps a rollback ready. If someone edits the live files by hand, the next deploy stops and says so.
03 - Who it’s for
Built for parents shopping for a nursery - and the owner who runs the shop.
Parents-to-be
Choosing a cot or a mattress on a phone, late in the evening. They need a calm page, clear prices and a checkout that just works with the way they like to pay.
Readers from search
They arrive on a blog article about safe sleep or nursery ideas. Topics now group the articles, and every address they already shared still works.
The owner
Edits the homepage, awards and mentions herself, and sends requests to one shared task board instead of long email threads.
The next developer
Finds documentation, a report after every session and a deploy that refuses to run over unknown changes - so nobody inherits a mystery again.
04 - Technology & the challenge
Working on a shop that never closes.
The shop stays on its platform and its hosting; everything happens around the customers, with no downtime. Before the first scripted deploy I downloaded the live theme and compared it with the code file by file - nothing unknown was running, but the public server held internal notes, source files and maps it did not need, and the first deploy removed them.
The host answers automated browsers with a bot check, so automated smoke tests cannot see the shop. Every update is therefore checked by hand along the whole path - product page, basket, checkout and each payment method - and plugin updates go in small batches, with all of the theme’s shop templates compared against the new version first. Even the blog needed care: addresses include the first category, so moving posts into new topics would have broken dozens of links. Every post kept its place and got a topic on top.
05 - The workflow
Audit. Clean. Hand over. Keep safe.
After the build, the care started with a security audit and a clean-up of the whole theme, then the homepage sections became blocks the owner edits on her own. When requests started to pile up in emails and chats, they moved to one shared task board, with a short video on how to use it. Every working session ends with a written report: what changed in the code, what changed on the live shop and what is waiting for the owner. Along the way the shop also got four short promo films for its social channels.
06 - Feature highlights
Small changes, made safely, that the owner can see.
Product pages offer express checkout right under the basket button, so every theme change and plugin update is tested with each payment method before it goes live.
+ An editor that shows the real page
Blocks open as a live preview with the shop’s own styles and sliders, and a pencil and eye switch flips between the fields and the preview - so the owner sees what customers will see before she publishes.
+ Share buttons without a plugin
Pinterest, Facebook, WhatsApp, email and copy link under every blog post, built into the theme in the brand’s navy - replacing a plugin with a known security hole.
07 - Results
A shop the owner runs - and a developer can change safely.
Viculii runs on viculii.co.uk with a cleaned-up theme, blocks the owner edits herself, up-to-date plugins and a deploy that backs up, checks and can roll back. The care continues: requests come in on the shared board, and each session ends with a report.
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