TEAM Asparona

TEAM Asparona - homepage

Website: no longer online - view screenshots

Size: 20 pages

My professional status: independent web designer/developer

Website client: James Fowler

Dates: January - April 2017, with ongoing support until 2020

Categories: Scoping/pitching/quoting, Client liaison, Project manager, Website designer, Front-end developer, Writing for the web, Content-loader, Responsive web design/dev, CSS-based layout, CSS3, HTML5, WordPress, Small sites

Brief: TEAM Asparona was a cloud-based Enterprise Information Management (EIM) company. Their main product was an EIM ecosystem called ContentWorX. ContentWorX is purpose-built to enable organisations of all shapes and sizes in all industry sectors to deliver better performance in crucial business areas such as cost, risk, customer engagement and employee productivity.

TEAM Asparona's in-house IT staff had begun the build of a new responsive themed WordPress website, and they wanted help to get it finished and launched as quickly as possible. General Manager James Fowler contacted me to see if I could help, and between us we came up with a list of tasks to complete within a fixed-price budget and tight timeline.

I was responsible for reviewing the site, migrating it to my WP hosting platform, tidying up the homepage, populating some pages and reformatting others, adding some new sections to the site - and generally preparing it for launch. After the successful launch I sorted out an SSL Certificate for the site so that we could transfer to an https URL. On a day-to-day level James managed the site, but I was always available to help with anything tricky, as required.

Achievements:

  • Working with James to identify a set of tasks which would get the website to a point where it could be launched as quickly as possible
  • Using the existing theme and already-built pages as a starting-point and building off these to produce the whole site
  • Improving the layout and formatting of existing pages, and tweaking the design to optimise the look and feel of the site.

My responsibilities included:

  • Client liaison and project management
  • Site review and identification of tasks that would get the website to a point where it could be launched within a tight timeframe and for a fixed-price budget
  • Providing the client with an overview of the tasks to be done and an estimate of the time required to complete these
  • Migrating the site to my WP hosting environment
  • Exploration of the existing responsive WordPress theme, figuring out how the theme worked and identifying inbuilt theme functionality that the site wasn't currently using
  • Improving the formatting of the Homepage, while retaining most of the existing homepage design
  • Putting together a new Blog section and content-loading and formatting a number of blog posts
  • Figuring out how site works in order to separate news and blog posts sections and have them both working automatically off posts
  • Building a new News section and content-loading and formatting a number of news items
  • Tidying up the formatting of the Business Needs page
  • Tweaking the existing design to make improvements to the responsive behaviour and look & feel of the site
  • Sourcing possible images for website from iStock, putting together a collection for James to choose from
  • Buying, optimising and uploading images that James had chosen
  • Creating the case studies and videos pages and content-loading these
  • Creating the team pages and loading them with dummy content in anticipation of real content at a later date
  • QA and proof-reading the content of all the pages prior to launch
  • Creating standard Photoshop templates for the different image types on the website - to keep them consistently the same size and shape to improve the look of the site
  • Extensive browser and device testing of my updates on the live site, to ensure that everything looked good and was behaving properly from a responsive perspective
  • Website launch, A record redirection and and post-launch testing
  • Purchase of SSL Certificate, transition of the website to https
  • Ongoing support and help with the site, as and when required.

TEAM Asparona responsive screens

A nice little project. I always enjoy finishing websites off and getting them ready for launch - I'm a Completer-Finisher by nature and I always love dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s on a project. I'm also a details-oriented person, and it's important to me that all the final proof-reading and QA checks are done properly and the site is as perfect as it can be.

The WordPress theme was (as always) new to me, which is always fun - they're all so different - this one had a Visual Builder at its core which is something I haven't used much in WordPress sites, so it was interesting to figure out how it worked and how to get the best results out of it.

In 2020 TEAM Asparona rebranded and changed their name, and the website was no longer needed.