May 12, 2020

At Atomic we serve a wide-range of clients, most of whom usually need straightforward brochure or portfolio sites serving specific customers and needs.

But once in a while a project comes a long that inspires us to go beyond all of our personal and professional limits, sailing off into totally uncharted territory. The new Sankt Oberholz family of websites definitely tops the list of creative and technical challenges we’ve faced.

Built on WordPress multisite, these four (soon to be five!) websites are all run via the same WP dashboard:

• Sankt Oberholz – the original domain repurposed as a gateway to their newly created divisions
• Coworking – extensively showcases a dramatic expansion of what is arguably the first co-working space in Berlin, if not Europe itself
• Coffee – profiling the cafes that started it all
• Consulting – evangelists and services for “neue arbeit”

Hidden beneath the fantastic design from Maria Helena Toscano is a bespoke content management system powered by the amazing Advanced Custom Fields plugin.

Having worked with drag n drop layout editors like Divi, WP Bakery (Visual Composer) and others for years, it was clear that there would be no way to manage such highly unique designs and page layouts with such tools. ACF saved the day, creating a way for us to deliver an extremely efficient editing experience with zero risk to breaking the original designs, which would have been impossible with the aforementioned content editors.

Upwards of 90% of the site can be directly edited by the Oberholz team, making it easy for them to add new location details, update photo galleries, list new job opportunities and more.

One of many examples can be found in this button linking to a room details page:

While at first glance it seems fairly simple, this was one of many situations where a traditional drag n drop editor would have made it next to impossible for their team to edit without breaking the design.

The button is comprised of four different elements — title, design arrow, room details and price. (Technically speaking, the text is actually three different fonts.)

Here’s what this looks like in the WP page editor:

So retro in its simplicity, it’s almost cool. 😉

Thanks to the ACF tool we were able to build a myriad of replicatable elements like this, making sure Maria’s design stayed intact and that the Oberholz team wouldn’t be held back learning complex tools and procedures for making basic site edits.

Big shoutout to Ansgar Oberholz for trusting us to bring these new sites to life. Hope you enjoy them!