Make It Move
There is nothing better than when you work for a client and you can’t help but brag about them to your friends, and that is exactly what happened while working for VeracityColab. As they tote they are an “Agency Thinking. Video Focused” company, and it shows through their work. Originally they reached out to me to add a few new features and clean up a messy wordpress installation, but before work began they decided to run a complete overhaul.
Being a video agency with exceptional live action and motion graphic work, “movement” and “speed” were key words in the new build. In shocking surprise they provided Salt with beautiful animated videos expressing exactly how they wanted the site to look, and move. Well… challenge accepted.
“Looking absolutely phenomenal.”
- Ian Nelson, CCO
Built from the ground up
All too often do I meet clients who have been running their site off of pre-made themes, but have “hacked” them to pieces to get their end result. With an array of out dated plugins, and feature after feature, the site begins to form into a frakenstein held together by ribbon. No more themes, mo more “making it work”, it was time they got a site built just for them.
How do you build a great site that works just the way the client wants it? From the ground up.
So first things first we knew we would be building a site that would grow and adapt with them. We love to strategize, so rather than just giving the client what they asked for we like to look down the road and foresee where they will be going. Building systems is part of the design process, a well built system is a well built design, so we took care as we built their back-end making sure we weren’t just creating an experience that felt good to the audience, but felt good to the client as they manage and update their site. We want to create products people want to use, not endure.
Emphasizing the Client
Being a video agency the focus had to be on the video, but more importantly it had to showcase great work done for great clients. Giving VeracityColab the ability to create posts that would capture the essence of their client as well as bringing attention and making it easy for prospective clients to see the work.
With custom colors, large hero images, and quick-playing their client’s featured work, we gave the team the ability to create simple art directed posts. The design of their work posts simultaneously becomes a quick peek at the content they created, allowing the user to dive into each new client and the work VeracityColab created for them.
Making Content Enjoyable
Ease of use and making it an enjoyable experience to create content is something we take pride in. We don’t want our clients to feel it’s a task to update their site, and it’s always the small and simple things that help make that happen.
For our clients that create content daily we love to introduce them to MarkDown, a language create by John Gruber that allows content creation and the formatting of that content to happen simultaneously. We provide a WYSIWYG, but with MarkDown any of VeracityColab’s authors can write and format their post on any device, where ever they are, with out having to worry about buggy UI elements. The biggest win is this not only makes content creation more light weight it makes it the focus. Authors can tend to get caught up in the formatting of a post when they should just be focusing on what it says and what it shows.
We gave VeracityColab the ability to write and format their posts with MarkDown which was a whole new direction for them. They were previously running off Visual Composer which allows a user to create an endless array of possibilities per page or post. It’s big, and it’s bloated. The first thing I knew that had to go was VC, and they were happy to see it go. Even more so they were happy to use MarkDown and adapt into their daily routine.
Last but not least we love suping up MarkDown with a little Jquery love. In marriage with our Foundation Responsive framework we find all the videos in the post and wrap them in a column and row. Immediate video siblings are put into the same row allowing the author to create images that can be presented side-by-side. If they want an image to be full width they just have to input with a simple line break and it will be in its own row. No classes necessary, no UI trickery, just entering the image tag where you want it to go and voila.
“Happy” Makes for Great Work
More than anything working with the team at VeracityColab has been a blast. We are incredibly thankful for the opportunity to partner with them, help magnify their reach and show off their great work. Please take the time to check out their work and get educated on what they can offer you, and keep your eye on the site as we are weekly tweaking, refining and adding new features.
Curious about our site?
To read more about the Salt Agency site and how we created it click the link below.