20/21 Creative – 2019 Review
It’s always good to look back at where you’ve been and what you’ve done in order to figure out where you’re going and what you need to do get there. As we come to the last working week of 2019, the 20/21 Creative team have been looking back at what we’ve accomplished.
In summary, we’ve done a shed load of great work this year. We’ve grown, we’ve explored and accomplished, we’ve become more streamlined in our processes and environment… but most importantly we’ve had fun doing it.
We’ve completed lots of great new projects with some of our regular collaboration partners, like the good folk at Brandbuild – as well as lots of new clients and our much valued existing clients. Thanks everyone for your continued trust in working with us.
In January our full stack developer Tim went travelling and exploring the world, but all was not completely lost as we gained Paul to step in to Tim’s shoes. A few months later Padma joined us as our Front End developer. Both came with much experience and enthusiasm. Gary continued to keep everyone under control whilst expertly manipulating SEO control panels and a plethora of advertising channels whilst Ange does her design thing with brochures galore and refuses to factory reset her mac.
All the while… Prince George continues to live his best dog life whilst barking at the biggest dogs that walk by the front of the office… as soon as they’re just out of ear shot. “A” for effort George.
We are very excited to see where 2020 takes us and what challenges we can rise to.
Standard Media Index
The year started with finishing a project for New York based advertising research company Standard Media Index. The project meant collaborating with teams across Australia, New Zealand and New York – so a variety of skillsets and timezones. The project went live in March and SMI have been very happy with their results since.
Redflex
Shortly after came Redflex. A fantastic company producing world-leading technology that improves road safety. Working with Brandbuild we built them a full featured wordpress multi-site offering both International and US specific content, as well as a portal for distributors.
Sustainable House Day – 15th September 2019
2019 saw some huge changes for the Sustainable House Day website. We decided this year to remove the php framework that was embedded into the theme, tests early on showed this was drastically impacting performance. Other improvements included overhauled the imaging system to standardise the image sizes throughout all listings. This meant some heavy lifting in gravity forms – which we’re now experts in 😉 Many more updates and upgrades were performed helping to manage, maintain and automate the listings, listing details and search results page. We even managed to neatly integrate with google maps for home owners to drag and drop a pin should their address not be recognised by google!
Big Traffic
There was a huge response to the website this year with a record 553 houses open compared to 226 last year, well over 50,000 visits across the country compared to 33,000 last year. The site faces a massive onslaught of traffic – 17,000+ users in two days and huge numbers in the weeks leading up to the event as well as hundreds of users all logging in to retrieve their house favourites on the day itself. Load time stayed under 4 secs throughout this period.
We did extensive seo work removing querystrings on individual house pages which resulted in higher google visibility for individual houses. We implemented a “favourite” feature which showed some houses reaching over 250 favourite lists! I bet they had a busy day! And we made it easier for people to view the google map of the property they were heading to!
Easterly Living
This year Easterly Living commissioned 20/21 to migrate their old, tired Magento store to a fresh new look based on the Shopify platform. The project was a large one – especially when it came to importing data between the two sites. But we are all very happy with the results and continue to receive great feedback about how easy the site is to use. More importantly, traffic and conversions are rising.
Schooled Online
We were all pleased with how Schooled Online turned out. It quickly became our favourite online e-learning platform. Great design from Alex Warder. There were a few woocommerce hooks and filters we needed to figure out but we were able to achieve a seamless user journey everyone was happy with!
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