Building a full-featured WordPress-Site

The website for the creative coworking-space sechserhaus was the main project while working with the awesome team at wundertüte. Sechserhaus is located in the heart of Graz and offers various services for working in a creative environment. The project was commissioned by Heimo Lercher, the founder of sechserhaus.

The team at sechserhaus gave us a quick briefing of what they wanted to achieve with their website and some technical requirements. The site needed to be responsive and the content should be managed via a proprietary CMS including blog-functionality and author-pages. During the initial meeting we exchanged some thoughts on the briefing-sheets and agreed on the next steps.

After an initial research-phase, we huddled up and worked out an information-architecture including some wireframes for the first prototypes. To offer quick accessibility to the most important pieces of content we decided to build a one-page scrolling site. This enabled the user to quickly navigate through the key aspects he or she was looking for when choosing a coworking-space.

Concurrently to the research phase we started with a visual inventory of design elements that we wanted to use throughout the page. This inventory helped us to explore the look and feel of the different sections within the site. It also ensured that we were all on the same page to find a general design direction. Furthermore it allowed us to remain a consistent look throughout the site.

After we agreed on the final look of the site we started developing an HTML-Prototype. This helped us figure out what we needed to optimize for mobile devices prior to starting with WordPress development. It was key to get everything show up in the right place at different screen resolutions before we started to make the site dynamic via WordPress.

WordPress was the best choice for this type of project, as it has all the features we needed and still offers great extensibility and room for customizations. For example we used different post-categories for the blog and event section or author-pages including a short bio and a small portfolio section for the coworker-profiles. Other small bits and pieces of content were managed with custom fields. All of this functionality Wordpress offers, has enabled the team at sechserhaus to manage their content in an unthought of easy way.

Our development team was also able to learn a lot during this process. It was a welcome and refreshing new experience and we were able to abandon the classic waterfall workflow and exchange it with a more modern and responsive approach to webdesign. As we handed off the website to the client, we only needed one short training session showing the basic ways to manipulate content with Wordpress and the team got hooked right away. The site is now live and kicking at sechserhaus.net.

Conclusion

We got included into the teams thought-process right from the start. We worked out an Information-Architecture, planned the hierarchy of the content and reviewed several design iterations, all closely together with the team at sechershaus. This was probably the main reason of the success of this project. In the end we could offer a full-featured website that helped the team to achieve their goals. It was amazing to see how productive a modern and responsive web design workflow can bee if only you work together with the client, not merely working for them.