Mark Stoner

Mark Stoner is a Sri Lankan men’s shoe brand with roots going back to 2011. The website is the brand’s public face: it tells the story behind the leather, explains the promise and guarantee that ship with every pair, and gives customers a clear path when something needs to be returned through a retail partner.

The product is not a checkout cart — shoes sell through stores and retailers in Sri Lanka — so the site’s job is trust and clarity. Visitors need to understand what makes the brand different, how to measure their foot against the size chart, what the guarantee covers, and exactly how to start a return without calling a help desk.

I designed and built the site for Deviitor D&D in 2017. It has represented the brand online since launch, and the release environment on Deviitor infrastructure keeps the stack deployable and testable as the brand evolves.

Goals & Success Criteria

Before writing code, “done and good” meant four things: a premium visual experience that matches a leather-footwear brand; structured content for story, promise, guarantee, and returns that non-technical staff can maintain; a size chart customers can actually use without guessing between sizing systems; and contact paths — email, WhatsApp, Viber — that meet Sri Lankan shoppers where they already are.

Approach & Key Decisions

Single-page storytelling over a heavy CMS. The content set is finite — hero, story, care, guarantee, returns, size chart, contact, terms — and changes infrequently. A custom PHP front end with modular CSS gave the brand full control over typography, carousel timing, and scroll animations without WordPress plugin debt. The trade-off: content edits go through deploy rather than a “Publish” button, which is acceptable for a site that updates quarterly rather than daily.

Retailer-first returns instead of e-commerce returns. Because most pairs sell in physical stores, the returns flow documents a step-by-step process — contact form, product number, receipt, guarantee card, original box — rather than a self-service refund portal that would never match how the business actually operates.

Measurement-led sizing. Shoe sizing is where brand sites usually fail: a generic table with no guidance. I built the size chart around foot length in centimetres with illustrated measurement steps, so customers map their foot to a size once instead of ordering two pairs and returning one.

Carousel hero with lifestyle photography. Three full-bleed slides anchor the brand tone — “Inspire Endless Possibilities,” “Confidence in Love & Style,” “Gets You Better Everyday” — with Unslider driving the rotation and a scroll cue pulling visitors into the story below.

Challenges

The hardest part was keeping the premium feel performant on mobile. Full-bleed photography, preloader animation, and scroll-triggered sections tempt you toward heavy JS; I kept the interaction layer thin — jQuery plus Bootstrap for layout and navigation, custom CSS for the brand look — so first paint stays fast on mid-range phones.

Local retail reality over generic e-commerce patterns. The brand sells through physical retailers, so returns, guarantee activation, and contact flows had to mirror how customers actually resolve issues in-store — not assume a mail-order refund portal.

Results & Impact

The site shipped in 2017 and has represented the Mark Stoner brand online since — story, care content, guarantee activation, returns guidance, and sizing support all in one place for the Sri Lankan market. The stack remains deployable on Deviitor release infrastructure, which is how the current build is served at release.deviitor.com/markstoner.co for staging and verification.

What I’d Do Differently

If I were building it today, I would extract the content sections into a headless CMS from the start. The custom PHP approach was the right call in 2017 for a fixed content set, but nine years on the brand would benefit from editable blocks without a deploy for copy tweaks.