Scappoose Business & Tax (Scaptax) had an old Joomla site which a) was not mobile friendly; and b) they could not, for various reasons, update. Obviously, this was a bit of a conundrum.
Client: Scappoose Business & Tax has been providing topnotch tax consulting to Oregon’s Scappoose and St. Helen’s communities since 1976.
Project Description: Build a new, easy-to-update website while leaving the old site operational during development.
The Inside Scoop
Scappoose Business & Tax (Scaptax) had an old Joomla site which a) was not mobile friendly; and b) they could not, for various reasons, update.
Obviously, this was a bit of a conundrum.
Scaptax brought me on to create a fresh site which would display nicely across various devices, and which could be updated with ease.
Toward this end, I implemented an independent WordPress installation on a VPS server, and focused on creating an elegant, professional design which would bring all the most important information to the forefront of the site.
The old site’s content had been setup as a series of images—i.e. each “page” of the website was simply served up as a static jpeg containing both graphics and text. Needless to say, this configuration made the site inefficient in terms of bandwidth, uneditable in terms of content, incompatible in terms of mobile responsiveness, and detrimental in terms of SEO.
Additionally, the content was decidedly sparse to begin with, so the new design needed to accommodate the minimalism of the presented information.
As part of the new design, I put together a logo for Scaptax which helped add some visual flair to the site’s header.
Lastly, the project required a scrolling text banner at the top of the page. The issue with elements like these is that they tend to display poorly on mobile devices. With that in mind, and a client determined to have one, I set about integrating a custom banner into the theme which would adapt reasonably well to various screen specifications.
My Favorite Part
Creating a fresh website that’s easy to use—both for the people updating it, and the people visiting it.
See the results:
www.scaptax.com
