Digital Media Specialists

The end client is one of the UK’s three largest banks.

Requirement

To develop a 200 plus page product site promoting the end client’s new international business product targeting the senior management of global companies as users.

Key functional elements included:

• Developing bespoke user administration modules and functionality to integrate with parts of the end client’s customer data
• Developing Flash/XML components to pick up XML driven data from multiple third party stock market indices and displaying the information as graphs on the site
• Creating and populating 200 plus pages of content and assets without a CMS
• Building the site to have a JavaScript and non-JavaScript version and for the site to be AA accessible compliant

Technical Solution

The site was developed as a non-CMS editable HTML website with functionality being developed using PHP integrated with an Oracle database to create all the bespoke functionality required.

Additional elements were created by integrating JavaScript, Flash and XML with both the frontend and the underlying application and database.

Project Mechanics

The initial phase of the project ran for six months from initial planning to launch and involved working closely with both the agency and end client throughout the project. Some key stages of the project included:

• Working with end client’s IS team to understand their coding and security standards and to replicate their hosting environment as the site is hosted on the bank’s own servers
• Developing front end HTML to meet the agency’s rigorous design requirements and the end client’s need for a very high level of accessibility
• Creating Flash functionality drawing data from XML feeds and that worked when the feeds were down whilst meeting the end client’s security standards for writing data to servers
• Developing bespoke functionality using PHP and Oracle to manage user access to the site and to integrate with some of the end client’s existing systems

Conclusion

The project required that we and the agency worked very closely with the client particularly in order to meet the end client’s very specific coding and security standards.

Heavy preparation at the start of the project ensured that we were able to meet a quite aggressive launch deadline to coincide with the global offline launch of the service whilst satisfying the rigorous standards of the end client’s internal IS team.

The project was extremely well received by the end client, being cited as one of the best they had recently worked on and has moved to further phases which we continue to develop and support.