Rosada Responsive Website
"Create a lean, flexible, measurable and maintainable website in Wordpress, which will bring more visitors to our outlet stores."With those words, we started our 8 week deadline
Being on a tight schedule, having to partner up with another agency who was responsible for the design and working with a crew that mainly consists of just two people, meant we needed a different approach than usual to make this project a success.
Usually we had a 'waterfall' approach towards projects, however for this project we took on a much leaner approach. Scrum, not in the traditional sense, with walls covered in post-it notes, standup-meetings and scrummasters. That was too much hassle for just a team of two (development + concepting) and a designteam somewhere else. However we did divide the project in more bite-sized chunks. Making it easier to test and review the progress with the clients and some users.
Concepting
During the sales process, my collegues had already agreed on the basic functionality needed in the first version of the website, so my first job was the functional brief to make sure everyone was facing the same direction. There after I started planning the content structure, creating basic sitemaps and flowcharts in Axure to use as guide during the course of the project.
From there on I started sketching in my notebook and later in Axure to create several low-fidelity prototypes to test the functionality and to use as base for the design. Some crucial pages got a little more attention in the the wireframing and where used to test with users.
WordPress Development
Besides the User Experience and Interactive design it was my task to set up the WordPress site. Since I've already been heavenly active in the project, I knew exactly what to expect and thus create. It was just a matter of finding a good structure in doing so. Therefore we created several custom plugins to serve as the backbone for the website and easily maintainable for future changes. Like the addition of a couponing system and form processing sytem in a later version.
Improvements later on
With the philosophy "Build it, break it, improve it" in mind, we continued development to improve the overall user experience and getting more and more people from the website to the physical outlet centre. Expand the user data in Mailchimp to send visitors more relevant mailings, a couponing syteem - where users can get a coupon on the website and exchange it in the centre for a gift or discount and a lot of under the hood improvements to the website. And a lot more improvements in the pipeline.