Kmart BirthdayClub Launch

Yesterday we launched a huge update and redesign of the Kmart BirthdayClub website for Sears Holdings. Not only does the new theme look a lot better, the content is much better organized, and its more usable that it previously was – both from an end-user perspective, and from a content management perspective.

Kmart BirthdayClub was originally migrated to WordPress approximately 7 months ago from its previous static and flash-based templates hosted on a WebSphere platform. The site attracted a decent amount of traffic and so some additions were made. The existing theme however was ill-equipped to handle the various new sections of content. The new theme solves most of the usability and information architecture problems that were present in the previous theme, looks a lot better, and leverages jQuery and CSS3 features like gradients, and box shadows to avoid unnecessary flash elements and imagery.

Like other sites I’ve worked on for Sears Holdings – FitStudio Gear, the Kmart Fashion Blog, and the Kmart Fashion Lookbooks – BirthdayClub makes use of my own Category Template Hierarchy plugin to modify WordPress’ native Template Hierarchy, allowing us to create specific templates for child categories. Every time I work with one of my own plugins I learn a little more about how to improve them, and that plugin – along with Media Categories – is due for an update soon.

Development for this project actually concluded a couple of months ago, but the launch date was repeatedly pushed back due to business constraints – much to the chagrin of Jason Corradino, who worked on the social media aspects of this project with me and wrote his own blog post about it long ago. He’s been eagerly waiting to publish it since we finished work  – unlike me, who lazily waited until last night  to write this, only once I realized we were really going to launch this time. 🙂