By Nathan Donaldson
Tags: Agile
As a company that makes websites we found, pretty typically, that the most difficult one to produce was our own. The current site is roughly eight years old and no longer reflects what we do, displays our most current projects, or is built the way we would build it today.
We have known for a long time that it needed to be redeveloped, and as we’re a fully Agile company we decided to apply Scrum to manage the boost.co.nz project. Not only will this put an end to the procrastination that has reared it’s head in the past, but it will also give us a chance to release the site in stages, and in the most transparent way possible.
Our first release is as basic as it could be whilst still being a viable source of information about Boost. We’ve created a homepage that displays our services, contact details and brief case studies. There is little or no design applied at this stage, that will come in a further sprint.
We have put a lot of effort in to making the site work across platforms, so what we have up for all to see will react according to the size of screen that is being used to view it.
Scrum gave us the flexibility to make enhancements quickly in the lead up to launch. For example, although we had designed the site to be mobile responsive, we had feedback during a sprint review that the contact details and map displayed at the foot of the mobile view of the site may be better placed at the top in order for people to access that information quickly whilst on the go. We were able to respond to this enhancement request very quickly and include this with our site launch.
We’d love to hear your feedback on our website so far – what’s working and what’s not. We’ll also be doing usability testing via IntuitionHQ.com in the near future, so we’ll tweet a link to the test via @boostnewmedia when the time comes. We would love if you could participate to help us improve usability.
Watch this space, we will be updating our blog as we continue to deploy further functionality and enhancements to the site.
