Tabaccheria Spinelli is a small smoke shop based in Vaprio d'Adda, a small town situated between Milano and Bergamo, Italy. The shop is managed by Andrea Spinelli, who is also the owner and the N.1 employee. He works with his family with passion and great attention to clients. The shop's main income is made up by selling cigars and accesories.

I met Andrea back in March 2012. After a short chat, he expressed me his wish to make a website from which to sell his products to a larger market. In a month, we came out with the first version of the site, which had a nice products slider on top and a couple of product categories with related products. Back then, I was at the very beginning of my path in the web development area, so I decided to met him again this year and to offer him a better product for a reasonable price.

The new website is completely different from the first version. The design, the code and the implemented features have all been done from the ground up. The main issue with the previous release was that there wasn't a shopping cart. People could order cigars but the system was quite rudimental (based primarily on email messages).

Now there is a bunch of new exciting stuff, thanks to the use of CodeIgniter PHP Framework and the Unsemantic Responsive Grid introduced by Nathan Smith. Clients have the possibility to order as many products as they like and to pay directly online through Paypal, using a Paypal Account or a Credit Card. After the purchase has been completed in a proper way, both client and Andrea recieve a message in their inbox with details of the order.

Speaking of the design, the site is clearly minimalistic, with an expressed flat taste and a vintage look and feel. The products are presented like cards in which clients can find the product name, a photo and a short descrition as well as a form to add the product in the Shopping Cart. The most interesting design element is probably the artwork on the top (The Man Smoking a Cigar).

On the previous version of the website, there wasn't a clear connection with the tobacco world and people weren't getting immediately what the site was for. But by changing the vision and by creating proper artworks, the site now is much more related to all the smoke & cigars stuff and bridges the gap that has been left wide open on the first concept.

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Rudyard Kipling