Synamedia
We teamed up with Synamedia to takeover their existing WordPress website. Our ongoing partnership is a great example of delivering value through a ‘continuous improvement’ service. This is a process of conceiving and delivering impactful features and performance enhancements to ‘legacy’ websites. We are working together to keep Synamedia’s current online presence evolving and performing.
One early intervention was to establish a modern deployment process. We set up a GitHub Action which automatically publishes finalised code updates to the live site’s server, in this case hosted by WP Engine. This under-the-hood enhancement keeps the live site codebase in sync with development and testing sites, laying crucial groundwork for the agile and reliable delivery of all future features and upgrades. It is not uncommon, even for companies with mission-critical websites, to have an error-prone and inefficient deployment process. We always make improvements in this area as an insurance policy against breakages, downtime, and misspending valuable developer hours on tasks that can be automated. We wrote at length about our robust deployment system here.
A key milestone in our first year of partnership was helping Synamedia to deliver a major new product launch called Senza. We designed and built a new product page. The challenge here was to gracefully iterate on their established design language. We created new layout components that had some extra polish and flair, giving the page a more modern feel, without jarring with the rest of the site or rendering all other pages outdated. This project served as an exemplar for future updates, something we can build upon to propagate the site with a subtle evolution of the brand’s aesthetic.
Other improvements to date include addressing a catalogue of nagging issues that site administrators had identified. Some of these issues were bugs, but most were simply missed opportunities to provide enough flexibility in content editing. We have been steadily extending the capabilities of reusable layout sections, to retrofit the type of options that the marketing team were looking for.
