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Development Company

Overview

Urbane Development (Urbane) is a community development venture and certified MBE based in New York City. Founded in 2008, Urbane cultivates innovative solutions to build dynamic neighborhoods and positively impact underserved communities. We envision neighborhoods that are defined by their strengths and experienced as places of opportunity and innovation. Urbane leverages the advantages of for-profit enterprise for community benefit by focusing on strategies that generate wealth and resource capacity for communities. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and anchor institutions in underserved communities take their businesses and organizations to the next level. This is our strategy for creating local wealth and a way to begin to address the social inequity caused by a failure in the marketplace to provide quality, affordable goods and services in dynamic, diverse, but underserved communities.

Challenge

Urbane Development is looking to expand its engineering capacity in order to support the new ApostropheCMS-based marketing website. They asked to implement the set of changes to improve UI/UX of the new website. 

The website was created with Apostrophe CMS. This is not a very popular CMS that needs a special skill and background. 

We were asked to implement some features with a tight deadline. Clients wanted to show a new website to their vendors at a  meeting. Our team successfully delivered changes.

Solution

  • In contact with clients, we organized and re-prioritized the tasks according to deadlines (most urgent – till call with vendors, less urgent – till the end of the year). 
  • We updated the image and video widgets with the functionality which allows them to turn off/on the lightning. It is necessary to pass ADA compliance tests. 
  • We updated the slider widget to randomize the order of slides and to make the UX more different. It required serious work on the backend.
  • We created the contact form, using Apostrophe modules functionality and Google API.
  • We added more options to header widgets (hide/show title on mobile/desktop view).
  • All this was tested on staging, built by SF devops. This CMS is not very popular, so the skill of DevOps operations with Apostrophe is pretty specific and rare.
  • Also, we finished a set of minor fixes: to allow multiple authoring for blog posts, to add the background to embed video, to fix the titles in header widgets

Results

  1. We were on a deadline for urgent and non-urgent tasks.
  2. While estimating, we tried to keep in mind the possible problems, so added the time for this. So we got the leeway for time maneuvering.
     

Business results for Urbane:

1. Save time and efforts for site edits and development:

  • More configurable widgets
  • Staging on Urbane infrastructure, which could be used for further development

2. Increasing business contacts:

  • Contact form for users is added

 

Tags: Apostrophe, widget, AWS