The site had a proper going-over this week. Most of it is the kind of thing you only notice on the second look, but it adds up.
- New layout across the whole shop. Bigger type, more room around things, and photos that finally show in colour. The old design kept every product shot black and white until you moved a mouse over it, which meant nobody on a phone ever saw the real colour of a finish.
- Product pages are simpler. The finish you have picked is named next to the label, the small swatch photos only appear when each option really has a photo of its own, and the quantity box sits on the same line as the buy button.
- Shipping is charged by the number of pieces in the order: one $10, two $15, three $21, four $28, five $32, and six or more ships free. The cart shows how many more pieces will get you there.
- The cart drawer, the cart page and checkout were all tidied. Fewer lines drawn across the page, one margin used everywhere, and checkout now runs as four numbered steps instead of one long form.
- I went through the writing as well. Less shop language, more plain description of what a piece is, what it is made of, and how it was made.
There are also two new marks. The round one now sits at the bottom of every page. The square one became the site icon, so it is what you see in a browser tab, and what you get if you save the shop to a phone home screen.
A few updates from jellysmith.com worth sharing.
- There’s a new order tracking page at /order-tracking/ (find it in the site footer). If a shipping confirmation ever lands in your spam, you can check there directly. PayPal orders track through PayPal email as always, and if you have a Jelly Smith account, your order status lives there too.
- For giveaway winners: going forward I’ll collect your email and create a proper order in the system, so tracking works the same way for everyone.
- I’m also thinking about building a /my-jelly page where I can show photos of customers pieces once they arrive. Not sure yet if it’s worth the build, but I like the idea of seeing where things end up. Let me know if that sounds useful to you.
- And the Beam Stand is back in stock. Small batch, just got a few more done.
The basic setup is done. Now I’m getting ready to run the first real test – the Beam Stand going up for sale.
The site takes PayPal and Stripe for credit cards. I made a favicon at 1:1, kept it black, and switched the main Jelly Smith logo to #a12616 – a deep red I’ve been fond of for a while. The original plan was to keep everything monotone, but at some point you have to let yourself have something you actually like. Once the red landed on the logo, I pulled it through the rest of the site too: buttons, accent elements, anything that needed contrast. Consistent, and it gave the whole thing a bit of life.
Spent some time cleaning up the smaller things after that – the cart, the single product page. Nothing the default theme couldn’t do with a little pressure. Just tighter, easier to move through. CSS is not my strong suit. Claude AI took care of most of the fine-tuning, and honestly it was a relief. That part went better than I expected.
The name Jelly Smith has been with me for a while. I’m Vietnamese, and my English has always been more functional than fluent, so the thinking behind it is pretty simple: Smith, as in a blacksmith. Someone who works with raw material, applies heat and pressure, and turns out something that holds. Jelly is the prefix I’ve carried across everything else I’ve made – Jelly Audio, Jelly Key. Felt natural to keep it going.
I also sketched a logo for it. Handwritten, which fit the spirit of the thing. The brief I gave myself was narrow: thin strokes, nothing complicated, nothing heavy. Easy to laser engrave at small sizes without losing definition. That constraint shaped the whole visual direction, because that’s where Jelly Smith products are headed — elegant, minimal, and almost always laser engraved. The logo had to work in that world before anything else did.
The site is new. It runs on WordPress and WooCommerce, hosted on AWS. Cloudflare handles caching at the edge via APO, and Redis takes care of object caching on the server side. Pages load fast. That’s the point.
For the theme, I stayed with Twenty Twenty-Five. No custom build, no page builder. Two fonts: DM Serif Display for headings, Fira Code for body text. One feels considered; the other feels like it belongs in a terminal. Together they work well enough that I stopped thinking about it.
Simple stack. Does the job.