I suppose due to all the awards given to the design of the MasterCard Engagement Bureau, MasterCard Biz decided a redesign mixing old with new was in order. All that was left to do was to bring the old site into the W2OPress fold.
The MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth had heard good things from the MasterCard Newsroom group regarding our work and needed a site redesign for an upcoming conference. This was the first opportunity to build a website using our new official software offering, W2OPress. I created a pinterest-styled interface and added ajax friendly ‘load more posts’ functionality to our suite of Wordpress plugin submodules. The entire site was developed, QA’d, debugged, and production-ready within five weeks.
W2OPress standardizes project development and facilitates more accurate estimates and faster turnaround. We have a library of in-house and vetted third-party plugin submodules that are versioned and available to use across implementations. Both client and product work are incorporated into our two-week sprints. This is the most agile-friendly approach I’ve heard of actually employed within an agency setting. From a developer’s standpoint, it is a marked improvement.
Following the responsive redesign of the MasterCard Newsroom that included modularizing the SCSS style files, it was a breeze to simply append a right-to-left module to mirror the design for the new Arabic region.
The Engagement Bureau needed some significant re-theming (including the addition of off-canvas menus) to make it accessible to phones and tablets. I spent a great deal of time modularizing years old style sheets that were thousands of lines in length. The DevOps team made developing via local vagrant instance possible.
At a certain point, admins using the MasterCard Newsroom found themselves their own worst enemy by over-categorizing posts and abusing tags. They decided to approach from a new angle: to focus content by properly utilizing custom post types (News Briefs, Press Releases, Digital Press Kits, Images, and Videos), and to round it out by cross-categorizing using custom taxonomies.
MasterCard required ongoing maintenance to the existing Newsroom while developing their new project: The Engagement Bureau. I acted as release manager, overseeing several other developers all the while debugging and performing maintenance on other projects.
MasterCard sought the ability to collect content from the diverse array of blogs they manage to create custom RSS feeds that group posts into similar foci. This would allow them to cross-pollinate content written by a number of separate entities worldwide by showcasing feeds from blogs of different origin.
I themed a mobile version of the MasterCard Newsroom optimized for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry devices using Foundation. This marked my first exposure to responsive design, media queries, and responsive images.
