Making sure V Magazine looks (and works) as well on the web as it does in print.
THE BACKGROUND
When the V Magazine team came to us, they were just ending their relationship with a digital agency whom they had commenced their responsive redesign and redevelopment with.
Most of the design had already been established and there was a ‘codebase’ for us to work with, but a major advertising campaign was coinciding with the relaunch and was just over 8 weeks away.
We would need to round off the design, restructure and refactor the usable bits of code and rewrite the rest. Not to mention, the enormous library of articles and content would have to be migrated from an archaic proprietary platform into a WordPress multisite.
THE BACKGROUND
THE CHALLENGE
THE CHALLENGE
- Use pre-existing designs and code to construct a well-functioning, aesthetically pleasing, and fully responsive website in 8 weeks’ time
- Evolve the website’s design to become cleaner and include rich features where they matter to the user
- Seamlessly migrate an enormous library of articles and content into a WordPress multisite
The Solution
CXR Agency’ architects and engineers immediately began with an intensive code review to understand which facets of the codebase could indeed be used, how much of it needed to be re-worked, how much would need to be re-written, and how much would have to be written from scratch.
Additionally, our user experience design team began to work toward realizing the goals that the V Magazine team had shared in our early conversations.
Once the designs had reached a mature point of refinement, we began preparing our product backlog for the engineering sprints that would soon commence. As we had a deadline to realize, we would have to amend our typical agile development process to retrofit our allocations and scheduling to realize our drop dead.
We did so by borrowing from our SpecialOps practice and began burning down our design, and engineering, tasks as effectively and efficiently as possible.
As modules were completed, they were pushed for review. Accepted modules were deployed to the staging server for use by the VMag team in their effort to get all of the editorial content ready for launch.
We continued to work in this amended, agile framework for the next 8 weeks in close collaboration with the V Magazine team.
RESULT
CXR Agency refined the VMag experience for desktop, tablet and mobile, and realized our go live date in time for the campaign. The site was built with a custom theme in a WordPress multisite and is served by Nginx on Rackspace. Additionally, the experience was crafted leveraging HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.
RESULT
