When I started freelancing, my good friend Michael van Tonder of Hunt & Saw was on a similar path and had a lead on an interesting challenge. Michael was in discussions with Bryan Miles from Miles AG, a company that had four subsidiaries that specialized in virtual staffing. If you need an assistant, webmaster, bookkeeper or copywriter and aren’t necessarily worried about where in the world they are, the Miles AG group can staff any of these roles for you.
The Need to Consolidate
The Miles AG group had reached a point where they had 5 different websites, each with it’s own branding and theme, all related to virtual workers but they all lacked a singular tie back to the parent company.
Each of these websites had its own WordPress instance with their own blog posts, pages, and CTAs to join the company. As one could imagine, this ended up becoming quite a large undertaking with duplicate content and code across multiple WordPress installs.
Five Companies Become One
The leadership team met with Hunt & Saw and went through the process of finding a single name that would be synonymous with their company’s values and offerings. After a few rounds of discussion and rewrites, the team decided on BELAY, and Michael went to work on creating the new brand.
The Build
Once the designs and UX/IA were finalized I got started working on the website. Time was of the essence with the site launch date and we had a lot of ground to cover. Michael was very supportive with answering any questions I had with the designs and how they would flow on the grid. If we still had trouble translating the design, he wouldn’t hesitate to give me a motion study.
Iterative QA
In order to get my projects out in time I prefer to work with designers who are comfortable with iterating over the same page a few times in a quick fashion. Typically a response from my designer would have a lot of notes and arrows all over the place.
Not everyone is well equipped to deal with feedback like this. Some developers could take this and it would be a huge point of stress and concern, but for me it helps keep a constant line of communication with my designer at all times.
This wasn’t the only way we passed our findings back and forth. Aside from these visuals we also had a google spreadsheet full of screenshots and notes from the BELAY team, which really helped keep all of us on the same page for where we were during the project.
The Launch
Coming up towards the launch date we were lucky to have a handful of key stakeholders helping us QA the site. We made sure to have stand-ups every other day to communicate any issues we may see and increased that cadence to twice a day on the last week prior to launch. The beauty of this team is that they understood the importance of being flexible when it came down to making decisions on critical items that were needed for launch. I’m happy to say we were able to launch on the exact date we had aimed for with a smooth deployment.