ONCE UPON A TIME
…there was a particular client, recommended by another client of ours (always rewarding to be recommended!), eager to have delivered a really challenging project: a full width, full responsive, mobile touch friendly and one-of-a-kind presentation website for the future third tallest office building in Bucharest: Unirii View.
OUR HEROES’ MISSION
This long-awaited class A office tower with 17 upper floors in downtown Bucharest had to have a one-of-a-kind website within days to be revealed during an official event. Besides being an important real estate project (already in construction), its classic New York style obviously had to be reflected in the website, too.
So our team had to focus on visual, visual, visual: architectural designs, all sorts of maps, minimalist menus and scrolls etc. – all functional within days. So basically, a really tight deadline for flawless designs and programming. An impossible possibility.
We first began to work on the designs – they immediately got approved by the client – with whom, by the way, we’re happy that we have such good communication. We had to make a lot of website adaptations on the fly given the amount of technical details this project implied. Everything went smoothly and we were on time, until we realized something really strange happened on apple devices – during programming and testing – which had to be fixed. ASAP.
THE 3 MAGIC CHALLENGES
It seemed relatively simple as design, but usually it’s the experience that teaches us that something apparently very simple can be really challenging to make… to be able to remain that simple. Doesn’t really make sense, right? Well:
First, the animations weren’t functioning at normal parameters (regarding speed and visualisation at least), although our guys used the best practices for that – pure CSS animations, hardware acceleration, so it really seemed very odd to have this issue.
Secondly, there was a fun and interesting aspect of the entire project: the vertical responsiveness. It’s not your regular kind of responsiveness for a website, and involved some hard work and a real attention to details because, if normally for horizontal responsiveness you’d have to consider three break points on horizontal (obviously), now it was a tough challenge because we had to consider three vertical break points for each of those three horizontal ones.
Thirdly, a short deadline.
So, besides a short deadline, our team confronted with these technical issues without the possibility to delay the scheduled event in which our client needed the presentation website to be working flawlessly.
AND OUR “WEAPONS”
The cause for the animation delay was, actually, the amount of html content we were trying to create them with. We had already tested any frigging’ possible way to solve it and even had come to the point of try irrelevant ones for this specific situation. Surprise! The solution was as simple as it can be: we separated the content from the structure using Ajax calls.
The second challenge – it wasn’t a real issue, giving the fact that we know the procedures. It’s just that the limited time mattered.
THE HAPPY ENDING
We delivered a full width, full responsive, mobile touch friendly & one-of-a-kind presentation website for the future third tallest office buildings in Bucharest: Unirii View, thanks to our creative & solution-oriented tech heroes and their intense efforts, but also to the client, who was very open-minded and trusted us and, more importantly, happy with the results.
