I’m pleased to announce the redesign of ScoreVivo.com, the sheet music publishing business my mom and I started in August 2011. The site has grown to 135 downloadable sheet music arrangements (mostly for flute) from about 20 arrangers and composers.
Backend Changes
I ended up making a lot of changes to offer the performance, stability, and functionality I desired.
| Item | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Host | Dreamhost | Digital Ocean |
| CMS | WordPress | WordPress |
| eCommerce | WP e-Commerce | WooCommerce |
| Theme | WP FlexiShop | Mystile |
I’ve quite pleased by the results.
Switching Hosts
Leaving Dreamhost’s shared hosting plan for a Digital Ocean VPS (virtual private server) plan represented a little over half the work.
With a VPS, I had to build everything from scratch. Granted, I’m in IT and was seeking an opportunity to strengthen my Linux skills. So building a Linux web server was a fun learning experience for me.
The performance of the new server, however, is the reward. My Dreamhost shared hosting performance continues to decline each year, as I imagine they are simply making their systems more dense.
Digital Ocean has been a great experience. I imagine I’ll have all of my websites moved off of Dreamhost by the end of 2014.
I Still Love WordPress
I continue to enjoy using WordPress and its vast ecosystem of plugins.
Adopting WooCommerce
This was a tough decision, for I knew that switching e-commerce plugins would be a lot of work in that I’d have to rebuild my product pages. But I think the reward was worth it. WooCommerce seems to have more features and feels more stable. I hope the effort in switching pays off.
Theme
eCommerce systems often require themes that support them. So I had to also change themes. Thankfully, the Mystile theme had a similar look and functionality as my prior FlexiShop theme. I only had to add about 50 lines of CSS tweaks to make it my own.
Functionality
The biggest addition to the site is the ability to selectively filter down items from the store. Customers may now filter our sheet music by instrument, ensemble size, difficulty, duration, tempo, arranger, and composer. Visit the Shop to try it out.
Design
For historic record, here are some before and after screen shots of the two designs.
ScoreVivo design Aug 2011 to Feb 2014
ScoreVivo design after Feb 2014
More Info
If you want to read more about this update, head over to ScoreVivo to read “ScoreVivo.com Opus 2.”