Turning a Stock Theme into a Handcrafted Website: The LAB Anti-Mall Case Study

Overview

The LAB Anti-Mall is a trendy outdoor retail destination in Costa Mesa, CA, featuring boutique shops and creative spaces. When they wanted a web presence that matched their offbeat identity, they turned to Domestic Equity Studio. Art Director Greg Douglas saw an opportunity: take WordPress, drop in a premium theme, and reshape every line of CSS until the site felt like it was built in a backyard workshop rather than a corporate office.

This case study dives into how careful planning, visual layering, and strategic use of plugins resulted in a website that doesn’t look like a typical template but still offers the convenience and power of a familiar WordPress backend.

Project Goals

The LAB team had clear targets:

• Create ahomemade, garagefeel without a polished corporate sheen.
• Allow easy in-house updates for events, blog posts, and shop profiles.
• Integrate livesocial media feeds, pulling in Twitter and Flickr content.
• Feature the three latest posts on the homepage in an engaging way.

Design Approach

Before any code was written, sketches and mockups in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator mapped out every section. Elements were imagined as layers of torn paper and surface textures. This initial visual plan guided the code phase — ensuring that each CSS rule had a clear purpose in supporting the off-kilter aesthetic.

Transparent .png backgrounds, random-angled elements, and oversized margins were all part of the strategy to break free from rigid grid systems. By mocking up designs at the pixel level, the team could spot issues early and adjust mockups until they nailed the right balance between chaos and readability.

Choosing Buro as the Base

Having completed their own site with the Kaboodle theme, the team evaluated a handful of WooThemes options. Buro stood out for its clean codebase and homepage blog integration. After a quick test in a staging environment, Douglas uncovered that he could override nearly every CSS rule through acustom.cssfile, making Buro the ideal launchpad.

Built-in responsive design, semantic markup, and straightforward template hierarchy saved hours of setup. All that remained was to strip away the default styling and reapply a fresh, brand-aligned look.

Technical Highlights

Custom Navigation Rollover

Instead of default text links, each menu item was swapped for a graphical sprite. Inspecting the theme’s HTML revealed selectors like .menu-item-500. By targetingheader .nav .menu-item-# ain custom.css, Douglas hid link text withtext-indent: -9999px;and inserted unique background images sized precisely to match the design.

Layered Background Images

Using multiple .png files as backgrounds on container elements let the team stack textures without additional HTML. Large, sometimes offset backgrounds peeked out from behind content blocks, amplifying that collage look without heavy markup.

Social Media Integration

Twitter and Flickr widgets were placed in strategic spots — the sidebar and footer. CSS tweaks rounded avatars, set link colors to match the site palette, and hid extraneous widget controls. The result feels like part of the design, not tacked-on third-party content.

NextGEN Gallery Custom Frame

NextGEN Photo Gallery plugin powered the shop showcase, but CSS combined with a background .png wrap gave it a unique frame. By fine-tuning margins and padding, the gallery and descriptive text aligned perfectly within the asymmetrical layout.

Outcome

The site now mirrors The LAB’s real-life vibe: layered, lo-fi, and a little rough around the edges — in a good way. Staff can post updates, tenants manage their pages, and visitors get an experience that feels authentic. All of this runs on WordPress, with WooThemes providing the backbone for reliability and future tweaks.

Behind the Scenes

It took approximately three weeks from concept to launch. By reusing the base Buro theme, the team avoided building templates from zero, spending most of their time oncreative stylingrather than plugin conflicts or PHP tweaks. A staging server allowed quick previews, and merging CSS changes back to production was as simple as copying the custom.css file.

Key time savers included:

• Leveraging Buro’s responsive grid to avoid writing media queries from scratch.
• Reusing sprite logic for multiple buttons to cut down on HTTP requests.
• Applying global CSS rules to common classes instead of item-by-item styling.

Lessons Learned

• Start visual planning in Photoshop to avoid surprises during coding.
• Pick a theme with clean markup to minimize template conflicts.
• Usecustom.cssas a single source of overrides for easier maintenance.
• Sprite sheets and text-indent tricks keep navigation quick and simple.
• Styling plugins heavily can make off-the-shelf tools feel like custom features.
• Layered PNGs can simulate handcrafted textures with minimal performance hit.