Building Holbrook's Clearance Center

The Brief

Holbrook’s Clearance Center is a local furniture store in Chico. They wanted a site to to explain what makes them special and worth supporting compared to online furniture retailers, and also promote sales and events and items from their showroom floor.

Design Direction

I built the site in WordPress using the Furnishop theme as a starting point, though the final result is pretty much completely custom. I used a fair bit of real photos of the staff unloading trucks, moving couches, and group shots to convey local real people vibes.

The site has seven pages:

  • Home — hero banner, featured sale, showroom gallery, where to find us, etc
  • Meet Holbrook’s — who they are, the ways they operate that make them special
  • Our Services — delivery, assembly, financing
  • Events — carousel of active and upcoming sales, as well as selected items
  • Our History — vertical timeline of archived advertisements
  • Community — monthly $1k nonprofit donations, Orphan Care International
  • Why Buy Local — the case for shopping local over ordering online

Custom Plugins

The free carousel and lightbox plugins I tried were buggy or didn’t work how I wanted. I realized that the library swiper.js made it easy to build exactly what I needed, so I made my own carousel with a fullscreen clickable lightbox. From there I learned WordPress plugin development, using the Claude to move pretty quickly.

Each plugin follows a pattern of a custom admin page with media library access, and a shortcode to drop it into the site. Since there are only a few things Holbrook’s staff actually need to update, making them simple admin menus mean they never have to touch the WordPress editor.

I built four:

  • Showroom Carousel — navigate images of the current showroom and see fullsized images with clickable lightbox, used on the home page
  • Sales Carousel — active and upcoming promotions with two shortcodes, one for the homepage feature and one for the full listing on the Events page
  • Selected Items — individual featured products with lightbox viewing, also viewed on the Events page
  • History Timeline — alternating vertical layout for the Our History page, swaps to streamlined layout on mobile

Tech and Deployment

The site runs on a Vultr VPS with Nginx as a reverse proxy and the official WordPress Docker image. I set up GitHub Actions to deploy when I push changes, with automatic database backups on each deploy.