SaaS WordPress Frontend Build — Chowder Labs AI Platform
Industries
🎯 The Challenge
Chowder Labs is an AI-powered social media marketing platform for Caribbean businesses. Their entire backend was already built — two custom WordPress plugins (REST API and dashboard renderer), WooCommerce Subscriptions with four membership tiers and seven-day free trials, WPForms onboarding forms, ACF Pro fields, and a fully working Meta OAuth flow for Instagram and Facebook. Despite a complete and functional backend, the platform had no polished frontend. The staging site was running a generic theme with unstyled shortcode output, no marketing pages, no branded authentication flow, and no SaaS dashboard shell. The brief was to build 20+ pages from a complete Figma design file using Elementor Pro, apply CSS styling to all plugin-rendered dashboard output without modifying any PHP, and deliver a frontend that felt like a real SaaS product — not a WordPress site.
💡 Our Solution
Switched the staging theme to Hello Elementor for a clean, lightweight base. Built the full marketing website — Homepage (8 sections), Pricing page with comparison table and FAQ accordion, and a shared Footer template — pixel-matched to Figma across desktop, tablet, and mobile breakpoints. Created a reusable SaaS sidebar shell as a single Elementor template applied across all five dashboard pages: collapsible from 240px to 64px icon-only on desktop, converting to a bottom tab bar on mobile. All five dashboard pages (Content Queue, The Secret Sauce, Analytics, Brand Settings, Dashboard Home) were wrapped in the sidebar shell with scoped CSS styling applied to shortcode output — zero PHP modifications. Built the full auth flow using a shared auth card pattern (Login, Register, Forgot Password — 3 screens). Restyled WooCommerce checkout with plan pre-population from the Pricing page and seven-day trial messaging. Applied a single product page template across all 8 WooCommerce products. Styled the My Account page and built two WPForms pages (Onboarding and Campaign Burst) in branded shells. Added a Social Accounts sidebar link and a connect accounts banner for new users with no linked profiles.
🏆 The Result
Delivered a complete, polished SaaS frontend across 20+ custom pages in 28 days for $750. All dashboard pages render correctly with plugin shortcode output styled to match the Figma brand system. The Content Queue — the platform's most important page — works with real content titles, generated thumbnails, platform icons, colour-coded status badges, and a functional slide-out detail panel. End-to-end Instagram publishing flow tested and confirmed working in live testing. WooCommerce checkout, auth flow, and onboarding redirect all functioning correctly. Client confirmed: "The dashboard is looking sharp." Project continued into post-delivery revision rounds with structured feedback documents, and ongoing feature additions including social account connection UI and conditional dashboard banners for new users.