The Wilderness Society

The brief

The Wilderness Society is an Australian environmental non-profit. It needed two things online: a main website to carry its work and its message, and a place to sell merchandise.

Those are different jobs. A content site lives on clear structure and easy publishing. A store lives on products, carts and checkout. We treated them as two builds that belong to one organisation.

Why Craft CMS

Craft CMS lets us shape the content model around the organisation, rather than forcing its content into fixed post and page types. Each kind of content gets its own fields, so editors fill in what matters and the templates handle the layout.

For the store, Shopify was the natural fit. It handles products, payments and orders well, and it keeps commerce out of the main site’s codebase.

What we built

We delivered the main website on Craft CMS at wilderness.org.au and a merchandise store on Shopify at shop.wilderness.org.au.

• A Craft CMS build with a content model planned around the organisation’s content
• Front-end templates built to match the approved design
• A Shopify store for merchandise, running on its own subdomain
• Two platforms kept separate, so each can be updated without touching the other

Built for the team

Non-profit teams are busy, and the people publishing content are rarely developers. We set up Craft so the editing screens follow the shape of the content, which keeps publishing straightforward.

On the store side, Shopify gives the team a familiar admin for products and orders. Keeping the shop on its own platform means merchandise changes never put the main site at risk.