How We Built the New Eezy Website and Enhanced Its Functionality
In this post, we talk about one of our front-end + back-end development projects. You will learn about the challenges we faced, the solutions we offered, and the results we achieved.
Smooth and efficient communication is one of the prerequisites for a successful collaboration. Today we want to tell you about one of our projects where our perfect communication flow and almost instantaneous reaction to the client’s feedback helped us meet all their requirements and timelines. This was done despite the time zone difference plus quite a few fixes and revisions that we had to make along the way.
The Client
Eezy is a leading creative platform that offers unique design solutions and professional quality content for agencies, brands, and media companies worldwide.
Among its products are aMarketplacefor downloading millions of professional stock photos and other creative assets, an Editor for drawing vector designs online, and a Design Studio that provides custom on-demand design services.
The Challenge
The client reached out to us with a request to convert the new PSD designs of their website eezy.com into quality code. Overall, we received complete designs for four pages:
Homepage
About us
Careers page
Job detail page
Initially, the client planned on handling the website’s back-end using their own solution but then had some doubts. We were supposed to deal with the front-end only.
In addition to converting the designs into markup, the client also originally requested that we provide a front-end Contact us form validation and include a Send to Email functionality.
Another feature we needed to implement was a slight parallax effect on the hero images on the Homepage and inner pages to make them look more lively.
The client specified that no front-end frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap should be used on the project.
The Solution
Key Technologies
To get the job done, we used HTML5 and CSS3 for the design-to-code conversion part and jQuery to create a parallax effect and copy link feature.
WordPress for the Back-end
Since the client only needed to perform some basic back-end actions like editing certain website sections, we discussed some possible options with them that would achieve their goals.
We suggested WordPress as the most viable and efficient solution. The client asked us to estimate the cost of implementing the back-end with WP and after we provided the estimation, decided to go with this approach. So in addition to the front-end, we ended up taking care of eezy.com’s back-end as well.
Using WordPress for the back-end also settled the Contact Us form validation and Send to Email feature integration issues. We installed the Contact Form 7 plugin for this purpose.
Parallax Effect
As requested, we also created a parallax effect for the hero images on the Homepage and inner pages of the site using the GreenSock web animation library. However, after seeing the result, the client realized that parallax on the Homepage was too animated and asked us to replace it with a subtle floating effect, which we did.
As for the inner pages, we decided to retain a slight parallax effect to keep things more interesting as the screenshot below illustrates:
Right from the start, our contact person, Nick Power, got the Eezy technical team involved in the project discussion process (by CC-ing them). That way we were able to speed up the exchange of information, get answers to our questions, and respond to the client much faster.
We were ecstatic with how our website turned out and really pleased with how easy it was to work with the folks at GetDevDone. We plan to come back with more projects in the near future now that we know GetDevDone can support our own engineering team with great front and back end solutions.
As the project development progressed, the client came up with another request. Nick also wanted us to add a slight hover effect to the buttons on the new site so we did that at no extra cost.
When we delivered the website for review, the client had a few comments and updates that needed to be addressed. Our Project Manager stayed in constant contact with the client’s team via email, passing on his requests to our team and getting back to the client with updated solutions
Since this occurred multiple times, we made sure to address the issues not only during the business day but even during our off-hours to make sure there were no delays or bottlenecks.
The Outcome
Thanks to our communication flow being polished to perfection over the years, we delivered the project in 9 business days, which matched the original ETA exactly. The Eezy team was completely satisfied with the quality as well as with our flexibility and agility even though we were located in different time zones.
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