Exprochile
A sawmill's export site in two languages, built to turn a visit into a quote the mill can price.
- Role
- All of it: design, engineering and content
- Client
- Exprochile SPA, a radiata pine sawmill in Chile
- Year
- 2024
- Status
- Live
- Stack
- WordPress block theme, theme.json, PHP, WordPress.com, Jetpack Forms, WordPress Playground
- Link
- Visit site
The brief
Exprochile SPA is a radiata pine sawmill in Los Álamos, in Chile's Bío Bío Region, with a team of 19. It cuts timber to each buyer's exact dimensions and ships it CIF from a single container. Its site is for those buyers, and its job is to bring in quote requests. I was in charge of all of it: the design, the theme, the copy in both languages and the launch.
The Products page on exprochile.com: what the mill needs to quote an order cut to size.
- Sizes in inches or board feet are accepted and converted.
- What has to be settled before a price, and what can wait.
- Every detail comes with an example of what to send.
- The same four grades as the home page and the quote form.
What it had to do
Speak to timber buyers abroad, in English and in Spanish, and show them what sets the mill apart: it cuts to each buyer's size. Get them to ask for a quote, with the details needed to price it. Stay on WordPress.com, where the site already lived, keep its Spanish addresses working, and leave every text, photo and contact detail editable without code.
How it does it
A native WordPress block theme, with no page builder and no build step. Products are ordinary pages: four grades cut to order don't need a catalogue plugin. The quote form is WordPress.com's own form block, and the theme never touches email. Certifications, markets and figures are page content the mill can edit.
In numbers
- 2 languages: English at the root for buyers abroad, Spanish under /es/
- 8 details of the order the quote form asks for: port, grade, dimensions, volume, drying, moisture, treatment and shipment date
- 13 ready-made sections and page layouts in the WordPress editor, for building new pages without code
- 0 page builders or plugins the theme depends on, and no JavaScript of its own
How it was built
-
Design once, in theme.json.
The palette, two type families, and the sizes and spacing are defined once and offered in the editor. Custom colors and font sizes are switched off, so later edits stay within the design.
-
Build from blocks.
Seven templates, two template parts and fourteen patterns, all made of WordPress's own blocks. An empty image frame shows instructions in the editor and is hidden on the live page.
-
Check every file.
Scripts check every file and stop on anything the rules forbid, such as page-builder code or a phone number hard-coded into the theme.
-
Run it in a throwaway WordPress.
Every template and pattern was tried in a disposable copy of WordPress, and every page was checked from phone to desktop width. The green was darkened to meet accessibility contrast on the paper background.
What shipped
Four pages, each in English and in Spanish. The old Spanish addresses redirect to their new place under /es/.
The home page covers cutting to size, the four grades, how an order works and where the mill ships. Products has the production specification and what a quote needs. About covers the plant, the team and the certifications. Contact is the quote form, with WhatsApp and the office hours in Chile time.
Search engines read the company's address, hours and contacts as structured data.
AI in this project
AI coding agents wrote much of the theme. The limits were mine: a native block theme with no page builder, no contact details or photos inside the theme, and no changes to the live site while it was built.