Having more work than time to do it in can be a good problem to have. That was the case with The Brand Stand, which was over-capacity and needed a partner they could trust to augment their current development team.
The Brand Stand had been working with their primary developers for over eight years, but they were overloaded. They were bringing on more projects and didn’t have anybody else on their team that they trusted to complete it to their exacting standards. So, the creative agency reached out to Howard Development & Consulting.
“Rob just was a very genuine person, seemed very knowledgeable, was very approachable and easy to communicate with. And those were all things that I was looking for in a development partner.”
Our first opportunity to help out was on the website for The Brand Stand’s client, Ground Media. Ann Marie explained that it was a project where their developers were up-front with her, saying that “there were a couple of portions of this website that we don’t feel technologically capable or confident in completing, nor do we have the time.”
The Brand Stand’s team was quite far along in their process. They had completed much of the development of the website themselves, but there were a few specific highly-interactive elements that they wanted to add. The purpose of these elements is to showcase a portfolio of projects in engaging ways.
On the homepage, there is a hero with animations that slide across the screen to represent all of their different case studies. They animate into the screen and move at different speeds, pausing on hover to reveal more information.
On another page, their projects are laid out using a masonry effect that creates a grid of blocks, each with a looping video that pauses on hover. This was completed using a new feature called CSS Grid that enables you to do so in a pixel-perfect way.
And, of course, all of the development was fully responsive across a range of screen sizes.
Howard Development & Consulting built a custom plugin that the end client could use throughout the site to pull in their templates and incorporate these elements. The Brand Stand had very specific design ideas for what the sliders and carousels should look like, so we overrode the default page builder to make sure that the elements were pixel-perfect to their original mock-ups.
Finally, the completed project was handed over with an accompanying instructional video for both The Brand Stand and their client’s use.
“I think the thing that I really loved the most was the delivery of the video walk-through. It was something that my team and I could save and reference back to. I thought that was highly professional and different than what I had seen from other developers, so I was very impressed by that.”
This video demonstration didn’t just have an instructional benefit, but it also helped The Brand Stand to communicate the value of the project to their client.
“The client was super-pleased. It was exactly what they were hoping for from a design perspective. And when we did a review of the back-end of the website with them, they understood the complexities and customization that went into it, which is always really important for us.
We don’t sell templated sites — everything we do is custom — and that’s always a business challenge in getting your clients to understand the value of what you’re bringing. And so when we were able to show them how it had been built, they understood all of the work that went into it.”