Project team: PM, backend developer, frontend developer and 3rd party designer
Working with Apex Group in a partnership was a smooth process. The management team had started the process of a branding refresh and greatly improved the website for the next stage of company growth. The extra challenge for the Holdingbay team was to be ready before the Christmas deadline, to share with investors and potential clients at an industry event.
This was the beginning of a joined-up digital integration phase for the client, so needed a solid base.
Objective brief
Existing Group website had been on the Joomla CMS platform so it was natural to maintain this and the staff training knowledge. The site though had been underused by the team, as they focused on showing the product auction website instead.
The research process identified that the group could promote better to their corporate customers who would then use the auction, with the successes and quality of the company. This would not be the aim of the Auction website when that was updated, so alignment with the branding and sales presentations and slide decks would raise the message for market leadership.
Approach
Take control of existing assets with an audit and extraction of content that was going to be reused. Work with the Apex writers to get the new copy and layouts synced up.
Working with the designer who was doing offline and online work meant the team could be right across the branding and everyone was on the same page.
We could build custom theme HTML and Bootstrap straight into a new Joomla development server. Letting the project team on both sides see the iterative process over the sprints. We were keen the writers could see the copy flow into the design as soon as possible. As Holdingbay was responsible for making the responsive mobile versions we needed to share feedback where copy or image choices looked different at different aspects.
Learnings
Partnering with Steve, Jordan and the team at Apex Group has grown over the time we have run this project and has moved on to the next project with Apex Auctions and with Bidlogix their software company.
Working with Joomla allowed us the flexibility to give the content team access to there work, and simple custom modules for layout in a bespoke way. We moved them to the latest version which had a few years improvements under the hood.
There will be an expansion into multiple languages in the roadmap, Apex Auctions with BidJS, and we are familiar with the CMS steps to do this.
Client: Apex Group Ltd
Link to current Apex Group website
