GetBold Website Redesign & Quoting-Engine Re-platforming

Overview

GetBold is a North-Vancouver-based custom apparel printer. Their public-facing site was a WordPress site with a basic online quoting tool and price calculator. I was hired as a solo full-stack developer to:

• Refresh the visual identity and make the site feel premium.
• Integrate a new front-end with InkSoft—the SaaS platform the owners believed would handle products and checkout.
• Improve SEO, performance, and conversion on both desktop and mobile.

Over three years I built the new site with Next.js + TypeScript, migrated content into Sanity CMS, and experimented with InkSoft’s APIs. When we confirmed InkSoft’s limitations blocked essential quoting features, I pivoted to a custom quoting engine. The redesign now runs at getbold-v3.vercel.app and will deploy on Vercel for production.

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The Challenge

Legacy pain points (WordPress)

• Outdated look & feel; inconsistent brand colours.
• Hard-coded PHP templates—marketing couldn’t edit pages without a developer.
• Quote form offered basic automatic pricing two decoration methods only, yet staff still had to finalise many quotes offline; no multi-decoration quoting.

Initial strategy (InkSoft integration)

• Connect the new Next.js front-end to InkSoft’s catalogue, cart, and checkout APIs.
• Keep inventory and order data inside InkSoft to avoid building a commerce backend.

Critical blockers discovered after ~9 months

Business need	InkSoft limitation
One design, multiple products	Only one product per design
Multiple decoration methods	Not supported
Custom price overrides & mark-ups	API locked; cannot override pricing
Extendable decoration catalogue	No way to add new methods (e.g., patches)
Transparent checkout totals	Workarounds via “notes” confused customers

After presenting these findings, the Manager agreed we should abandon InkSoft and own the entire quoting workflow.

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Solution

Technology stack

Layer	Choice	Rationale
Front-end	Next.js, TypeScript	SEO, file-system routing, React ecosystem, type safety.
CMS	Sanity	Real-time collaboration, block-based content.
UI	Mantine	Fast theming and rich component set.
CI/CD	GitHub Actions → Vercel	Preview environments + global CDN.

Key features shipped

1. Flexible Quote Builder — Any number of products & decoration methods per design; real-time pricing via custom mark-up rules.
2. Responsive Design System — New colour palette and typography scale with accessible contrast.
3. Transactional Emails — Branded SendGrid templates with dynamic order summaries.
4. Performance & SEO — Better LCP/CLS, structured data, cleaner URLs.
5. In-house Ownership — All code in GetBold’s GitHub org; no vendor lock-in.

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Results

I wrapped up my work on GetBold in April 2026 with the redesigned site and its new quoting engine live; the figures below reflect the version I shipped. (After my engagement ended, the company brought on an external SEO agency that has since revised the hero and footer, so the current live site may differ from the screenshots shown here.)

Lab audit — Lighthouse (desktop, 21 Apr 2026)

Category	Score
Performance	94
Accessibility	100
Best Practices	100
SEO	100

Core Web Vitals and lab metrics (desktop):

Metric	Value
First Contentful Paint	0.3 s
Largest Contentful Paint	0.5 s
Total Blocking Time	130 ms
Cumulative Layout Shift	0.121
Speed Index	0.5 s

Field data — real users (Chrome UX Report, desktop)

Beyond the lab audit, real-user data from the Chrome UX Report shows loading performance and interactivity holding steady in Google's "good" range, with a clear step-change in loading performance around the relaunch. Visual stability also sits in the "good" range, though it has started to trend upward (regressing) in the most recent months.

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Visual comparison

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Lessons & Next Steps

• Validate platform constraints early—time sunk into a closed SaaS can exceed building bespoke.
• Embed CMS from day 1—marketing can iterate without code freezes.

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Links

• New site: https://www.getbold.com/