Melbourne
After the success of their Serverlove project, Melbourne approached designer Gavin Burnett and myself to work on their new website to commemorate their move into new offices.
As with Serverlove, Gavin created the designs handed them to me and I turned it into a fully functioning WordPress build.
The brief
The current website was running on a bespoke CMS and Melbourne wanted to start using WordPress for its ease of use. Thankfully, someone at Melbourne had already converted the existing site content into a WordPress install so that made my life a lot easier.
The design
Having worked with Gavin Burnett before on a few projects like Your Office Anywhere, I knew what to expect: a very clean, almost minimal design with graphical flourishes that would be relatively easy for me to build and that’s what Gavin delivered.
The development
As with most of my recent WordPress builds, I’ve tried to make use of custom post types and custom fields as much as possible in order to make it easy for the people managing the site to add/edit content.
Where possible CSS3 was utilised to ensure minimal HTML classes had to be used throughout the site. Properties like border-radius reduced the amount of HTML used on the old site significantly; this should have a impact on two levels:
- Easier for the client to maintain – adding classes in WordPress’s WYSIWYG (visual) editor just isn’t fun
- Better content to HTML ratio which may (and no guarantees here) improve search engines rankings
Timelines
The development of this WordPress build took 6.5 days from start to finish for the development with a total turnaround time of just under two months (the first meeting was 19th October and the launch was 7th December) which is pretty quick for a website of this size and shows how fast websites can be turned around when the client really pushes it through.
The deadline on this site was tight as Melbourne wanted the site up and running for their new office move. View pictures and a video of Melbourne’s incredible new office.
Summary
Having worked with Melbourne before, I jumped at the chance to again because they’re a great client. They’re open to good ideas, they pay their invoices on time and for this project in particular they assigned a Project Manager, Josh, who ensured that the project didn’t slip – plus as they’re a technically minded bunch it means I don’t have to spend as much time explaining how to do things to them as I do with other clients (not that I mind doing that). All these ingredients make for a successful project.
