01 — Client
About the project
Tales of Courage is a series of twelve therapeutic tales by Yuliia Raievska, a child psychologist. Each book helps a child live through one fear: the dark, kindergarten, the dentist. The site had to sell these books to parents in Germany and worldwide, open instantly and stay simple enough for the author to run herself.
02 — Context
The task
The old site was built on a block builder, and the shop ran on WooCommerce for the sake of a single product. A cart, a checkout and a customer account served one PDF book at fifteen euros. The home page talked about three occupations at once: photo sessions, fairy-tale therapy and workshops.
Selling PDFs across Europe runs into VAT: the rate depends on the buyer’s country, and per-country reporting is out of reach for a solo author. The legal pages contradicted reality: the Impressum called the site non-commercial while a “Buy” button sat next to it.
The site needed narrowing, not redrawing. The psychologist stays as the frame of expertise, the books become the product, everything else goes.
03 — Solution
How it works
3.1
Design in six iterations
The design system was built in Figma: warm paper, the book serif Alice, a pastel tile for every problem. The logo and brand colours stayed, the layout changed. Six versions of the home page from strict to “bookish”; the final one is in a children’s register, illustrated with art from the books themselves.
3.2
A custom block theme
No builders. A lightweight FSE theme on native blocks: tokens in theme.json, fonts served locally and split by alphabet, CSS at seven kilobytes after minification. The author edits content in the regular block editor, not in settings panels.
3.3
A shop without a cart
WooCommerce is gone. Books became a custom post type in a separate plugin: storefront, book cards, a filter by problem, a “parents with this problem also take” block. The shop adds not a single script to the page. Payments go through Lemon Squeezy as Merchant of Record: the service calculates and pays VAT by the buyer’s country, issues invoices and stores purchases. Details in a separate case study.
3.4
A custom cookie banner
Instead of a heavy consent plugin, a custom one: three kilobytes, not a single cookie or external request before the visitor chooses, equal buttons in line with German supervisory practice. Also a separate case study.
3.5
Speed and data
The first measurement after launch gave 92 PageSpeed points on mobile. Then we tightened the details: illustrations in WebP, fonts split by alphabet and preloaded, minified theme CSS, images below the fold lazy-loaded. The result is 97: the main image appears in 2.5 s, layout shift is zero, and the first screen is about 150 KB.
Analytics: Independent Analytics, with no cookies and no external servers. Rank Math with every outbound module switched off, redirects from all old URLs, custom JSON-LD for books.
3.6
Legal
The Impressum and Datenschutzerklärung were rewritten for the fact of selling: Kleinunternehmerin under § 19 UStG, Lemon Squeezy as the seller, Cloudflare, the pixel only with consent. The link to the closed ODR platform was removed so as not to invite claims.
04 — Outcome
Result
The site became a single author’s shop: twelve books instead of one product, a free tale as the lead magnet, a blog that leads to the books. The author adds books and articles herself, with no developer.
Visitors’ personal data stays in-house, and the legal pages match what the site actually does.
