yWhales - Business Website Redesign & Rebuild

Jay reached out to me for a rebuild of both the existing yWhales & Finramp websites onto Squarespace for ease of use & management afforded by the all-in-one platform. This case study will focus on yWhales in particular since it was slightly more involved with more customizations and a larger bulk of content to migrate compared to Finramp, however, both were almost identical in process, so I'll link to both at the end. The bulk of the website was to remain the same as initially designed, however, there were some sections, features, and styling that would need to be modified and redesigned to suit Squarespace functionality, native abilities of the platform as well as some custom plugins & CSS to manage these various modifications, allowing them to blend in with the design & branding of the site. The site, in general, was a standard, multi-page business website, showcasing company information, providing contact options, as well as some auto-play videos related to the various service offerings and the business in general. The main redesigned element was the custom "Team" sections which utilized a vertical accordion tab plugin coupled with a back-end collection page type to organize & display the team members in a visually appealing manner. In addition, some CSS hover effects were applied to allow for team titles & details to show. Squarespaces "pinned blocks" feature was used to implement "sticky" images within a section to create a scroll animation effect without the need for any advanced scroll trigger libraries, thus reducing load times, cost, and complexity in the build. In addition to all this, there were over 50 blog/podcast items to migrate from the old site to the new build, these mostly included embedded YouTube podcast episodes along with text descriptions & links to relevant partners. This was not possible to migrate automatically so a streamlined manual approach was employed. After all content was added to the new site, a customized category filter navigation was set up to allow the blog/podcast items to be easily filtered by site visitors. All in, this project was completed & handed off in approx 4 weeks, when Jay was ready to make the switch from the old site to the new one, he simply swapped the domain over and the new site was launched effectively.