How WordPress Retainers Proved to Be the Optimal Website Redesign Solution
Density is a B2B company based in San Francisco, that has created an occupancy and space utilization analytics platform. Their solution tracks anonymously how people use buildings and in-door spaces and is based on deep learning algorithms. Density’s modern infrastructure consists of hardware and software, and an API to further create tools based on data. Founded in 2014, today Density’s customers include companies like Dropbox, Envoy, Sheraton, facebook, Schneider Electric and many more.
Scope of the Project
- Density’s new corporate website development
- Migration from a static website to a WordPress CMS platform
- Flexible additional development work to support the sales process
The Challenge
Density contacted DevriX at the beginning of 2019. Our initial task was to build their corporate site that is used to present and sell their services and products. At that time, Density had a site, published on their domain, but it was static and could not be updated easily. They also had high design expectations and the site had to look clean, crisp and modern. They had created original mockups that DevriX had to integrate and use for the whole website’s design.
The Solution
DevriX works with Density on a monthly development retainer plan. That gives both parties the flexibility to prioritize the custom development work needed and easily adapt to current Density needs.
DevriX started the website as a new WordPress-based project, utilizing DevriX’s own Starter theme and made some improvements to it. We launched the site’s primary version within three weeks. Shortly after that we pushed live the Webinars and Blog features, following them were tasks like documents (PDF), more advanced work with Marketo forms, the Customers post type and the Support page.The technical WordPress solution includes the Advanced Custom Fields Pro (ACF) plugin for managing content on custom-build page templates. We have built the site with over eight custom post types, 35+ flexible page templates, each with multiple custom editable sections. All templates and sections can be rearranged easily by the editor team of Density.
The website also utilizes Gutenberg for editing content for the blog posts and all other custom post types, It integrates the mockup designs provided by the Density team.
Density’s design team provided a style guide for the color scheme that was implemented through Sass variables and reused across the site. This helped us ship color changes very quickly without having worries about regressions across the site. Browser Support: the website supports the latest version of all primary browsers in addition to IE 11.
The whole codebase was written with the intention to be clean and tidy, to secure good performance for large scale operations and great visuals
Success Indicators
The first build of the website was completed within three weeks. Since then, we have had weekly deployments to add more and more various features. The website was built with a clean front-end structure and easy editing backend capabilities, allowing both easy content updates by the client and seamless continuous development work.
We show-case this project as an example of how WordPress development retainers work for the gradual building of complex websites.