Web Design & Development Projects

Event Website Maintenance Plan | Event Intelligence

At Buink, we recently completed an extensive event website maintenance project for our client, Connexia, utilizing our expertise in Laravel and Vue technologies. Our focus was on maintaining the functionality, reliability, and performance of the Event Intelligence App. Here’s a glimpse into the work we accomplished:

Key Activities:

Release Management: Our team efficiently handled multiple release cycles, which involved closing releases, testing code on production, and ensuring smooth deployment. This process was critical in maintaining the app’s stability and introducing new features without disrupting the user experience.
Site Speed Optimization: Recognizing the importance of performance, we conducted a thorough review of the site’s speed, implementing optimizations to enhance the overall user experience.
Bug Fixes and Code Reviews: A significant portion of our time was dedicated to identifying and resolving various bugs, such as font-awesome compiler issues, invalid sentry variables, and login-related problems.
Quality Assurance and Review: Our team conducted detailed reviews on QA environments to ensure that each release and bug fix met our high standards for quality and functionality.

Highlights:

Efficient Time Management: Our detailed time tracking for each task highlights our commitment to efficiency and transparency. We spent most of our time on the main project, with additional time allocated to specific releases, bug fixes, and optimizations.
Technical Proficiency: The project showcased our technical proficiency in Laravel and Vue, enabling us to handle complex challenges and deliver high-quality solutions.
Client-Centric Approach: Our focus on support plan management and regular reviews reflects our client-centric approach, ensuring that each aspect of the project aligned with the client’s goals and expectations.

Conclusion:

This project exemplifies Buink’s dedication to delivering exceptional event website maintenance services. Our blend of technical expertise, efficient project management, and a client-focused approach ensures that we not only meet but exceed our clients’ expectations.

Website Maintenance | Herc-u-lift

Recent Project Showcase: Web Development and Security Enhancement

Project Overview: Over the past several months, we have been deeply involved in the ongoing support, website maintenance, and security enhancement of a web application for Herc-u-lift. This project included a series of critical tasks aimed at improving the app’s security and maintenance.

Key Responsibilities and Achievements:

Regular Builds and Updates: Conducted multiple reviews of the app build and fixed issues with the build along the way. This keeps the codebase fresh and ready for work if the need every arises to implement a fix or new features.
Comprehensive Security Audits: We conducted an extensive security audit encompassing:
- Examination of server logs.
- Ensuring the implementation security best practices.
- Review and update of third-party packages for security enhancements.
- Analysis of database tables for sensitive data handling and encryption.
- Inspection of application routes, controllers, and logic for any security oversights, particularly in authentication and authorization processes.
- Verification of SSL certificate setups and database connections for optimal security.
- Review application code for security issues.
- Creation of detailed documentation for deliverables.
Code and Repository Management: Focused on maintaining clean and secure code repositories. This included ensuring no sensitive is exposed in the codebase.
Server and Database Security: Conducted a review for any issues.
Ongoing Maintenance and Planning: Regularly cleaned up pending tasks and prepared cards for future services, demonstrating a proactive approach to website maintenance.

Impact and Client Satisfaction: The Herc-U-Lift app has significantly benefited from these efforts, showcasing enhanced performance, tighter security, and a more streamlined user experience. Client feedback has been positive.

Website Maintenance, Security, & Support | Otto

We’ve worked with Otto for many years and we continue to maintain, support, and add new features to both their web and IOS app.

Many entrepreneurs underestimate the amount of support and maintenance that web and mobile apps need. One of the most costly items needing maintenance is integrating with third party data providers. This is why you should always involve your developers in third-party decisions.

Otto did consult with us about Finicity and we’ve been very happy with their service but because it services the financial industry they’re constantly updating to the latest technology. As Finicity upgrades their api, our integration needs to be upgraded as well. To minimize the affects of third parties on our codebase, we build in a forward-thinking way to make it easier for future developers to make these updates.

We also added several new features to allow users to share their budgeting data with their financial coaches. These new features allow Otto to focus their marketing efforts on financial coaches rather than the end user. Delivering code solutions that drive business goals is what sets us apart from other providers that just do what they’re asked and don’t proactively try to understand how the code connects to the strategy.

Given that this app deals with financial data and integrates with banks all over the world, we have to stay consistently focused on security. Luckily, our client is proactive about weeding out fraud and abuse. Maybe even too proactive (if that is even possible). They asked us to make some changes that would be good to have, but that made us hesitant because there were other more important security features that we’d have to table. We pushed the team to take a step back and create a priority list of security features that would be more affordable and also more effective. This resulted in some easy changes that continue to help us catch and eliminate fraud attempts.

Lastly, we continue to fix small bugs found in the system. It is impossible to list all the ways bugs get into a system: sometimes bugs were introduced by the original logic specifications, sometimes when new features are specified without fully taking into account the entire system, sometimes they’re because the original code incorrectly passed the quality assurance tests, sometimes because of miscommunication, and sometimes just because of human error. But, regardless of how they’re introduced, we’re able to get them resolved quickly and effectively. Luckily, most bugs are small and affect very few, if any, users.

WordPress Website Design & Development | ClearGPS

We built a new website for an existing client. They launched a new product for Heavy Equipment Fleet Management Software and they wanted to get started on the right foot.

We started with the copy and tasked one of our skilled copywriters to capture the essence of the product offering. We wanted a good balance between sales copy, search engine copy, and general information.

The copy laid the foundation for the design. We worked closely with the client to capture a look and feel that would be professional, functional, and effective. After a couple iterations we moved on to the other pages. One thing you’ll notice in the design is how we attempted to tell the story of how the device can benefit heavy equipment.

We wanted to launch as quickly as possible and started developing before the entire design was done. Overlapping design and development have some tradeoffs but if speed is a priority, then I highly recommend that strategy.

The development stage went as planned. We engaged a very skilled developer that was a little new to WordPress. We got the benefit of his great experience in PHP and front-end development but we had to help him get up to speed on strategies we can leverage in WordPress. Although it took him a little longer than if we’d engaged a WordPress expert, the entire project came in under budget because we saved a lot in the design phase.

One highlight of our development is the way we separate the data models from the theme by using a custom plugin and custom Gutenberg blocks. I’ve talked about this before but this architecture makes it really easy for future developers to update the themes.

Another highlight is that this client decided to go with a fully custom theme. Themes we build from the ground up are much less likely to need costly updates as WordPress updates the WordPress core. To give you an example, the site that you’re reading this on has had minimal updates for the past 8 years. Sure, it probably does need a design refresh, but at least we haven’t been forced to do an update.

Lastly, this client knows the value of search engine optimization, so we ended the project by doing a full review and optimization to get our performance and seo scores to be very high. We don’t need them to be 100% because some of the factors in the score don’t actually matter that much for getting traffic, but we try to get them as high as we can within a reasonable budget. This work will set the foundation for future SEO content to attract traffic.

Website Maintenance & Support | Event Intelligence

We launched our support plans at about the time we finished developing phase one of this web application. This client opted for a support plan that allowed us to not only maintain their codebase and fix any bugs that popped up, but also add some improvements to the existing functionality.

In addition, they opted for weekly error monitoring which allowed us to catch issues quickly and fix them even before the users reported them. There were several instances where we saw an error, found the fix, and implemented the fix all before anyone (maybe even the end user) knew there was a problem.

This client also opted for a support plan that included a security audit. Given that we push clients to control all their own accounts (like hosting, codebase, etc.), the security audit gives us a good chance to review everything and make sure to close any loopholes that may have been left open by developers or the client. In this case, we did recommend that the client turn on two-factor authentication on the server account to make it very hard for unauthorized access. We also found a couple logs that indicated possible vulnerabilities. They didn’t end up being security issues, but if they were, the support plan would have saved the day.

As part of the support plan, the client was able to reach out and get immediate help when a couple issues affected their customers. We answered several emails and got issues fixed right away.

Now that the application has hundreds of people using it every day, small bugs started popping up. It was nice to have a budget to get those fixed quickly. Some bugs were related to unconventional usage and others were just difficult to test for. But it was nice for the users to log in and magically find things working as expected.

In addition to bug fixes, we were able to increase the page speed of several pages. This type of work isn’t typically included in a support plan, but sometimes we’ll make a judgement call to make improvements if the budget allows and if we think users will benefit from it.

WordPress Website Development & Design | Heavy Equipment Website

We finished most of this website rebuild months ago but we did some final touches including some SEO improvements these past couple months. We won’t mention the name of this client at this time because they’ve since decided to redesign the site again before launching (long story).

The over all project was to take their old site, give it a facelift, improve its performance, increase it’s traffic, and make it easier to add content. I think we accomplished all of those goals.

We put a lot of thought and energy into making the site easy to maintain and most, if not all, of the content can easily be edited by the client without needing to pay a developer. The client can add carousels, tabbed sections, buttons, product sliders, product showcases, story showcases, and category showcases. This helps them create beautiful and functional pages all without developer time. The more content they create, the more traffic they’ll get, so making the site easy to maintain also drives our goal to increase traffic.

One highlight of this project is our use of Gutenberg blocks and enforcing a hard separation between data related code (found in the plugin section of the site) and view related code (found in the theme section of the site). This is something that we’ve seen very few of our competitors do, but that provides lots of benefits. For instance, it will give future developers the ability to manage the data and view separately, making re-skinning easy. A lot of time and money is invested in creating the content, so we don’t want to risk loosing that investment when the company needs another facelift.

Part of this project was to allow users to dynamically see the product information and inventories in the client’s legacy ERP system. We created a custom WordPress plugin to manage that integration. This integration makes the site more valuable for potential customers and in-turn more valuable for the company.

Another benefit of this site is document management. This client has a lot of documents that they share with their clients and these documents need to be updated often. To help them with this task, we created a documents post type to give documents their own section. This will allow them to manage these documents with ease.

We also created several different page templates that the client can use to add pages at-will. These templates include: About Us Page, Blog and Blog Filter Pages, Business Owner Page, Career Page, Document and Document Single Page, Customer Stories, Front Page, Location Contact Page, Products Page, Sales Product Page, Search Page.

We ended the project with a little SEO structure work. We optimized the site code and images to signal to search engines that we’re a credible place for users. We did some work making sure we don’t have any broken links when we launch the new site. We also implemented some code to make sure images are sized right and served in next-gen formats. Lastly, we improved the page speed so the site loads fast. As you approach perfect browser scores you get diminishing returns, but we’re happy with the scores we ended with:

WordPress Landing Page Design & Development | Buink

At Buink Web Development, we’re not your typical agency. We like to think of ourselves as a humble and cheerful bunch of tech-savvy individuals who just happen to be experts in web development. Our goal? To deliver exceptional work that speaks for itself. So, let’s take a stroll down memory lane and showcase one of our past projects: our recent foray into the world of support and website maintenance. As part of this exciting venture, our team set out to create a captivating landing page for Laravel Support. Now, you might be wondering how it all went down.

Well, let’s just say it was a tale of budget constraints, unexpected twists, and triumphs. When it came to the design aspect, we managed to sail through smoothly, completing it in half the anticipated time. However, the development phase decided to put up a bit of a fight, devouring those saved hours. It happens, right? One of our values is clarity, after all.

Now, here’s the interesting part: it was our developer’s maiden voyage in creating a page for the site. And let’s be real, like any new adventure, it takes a little time to find your sea legs. But that’s where our secret sauce comes into play. While other folks in the industry might leave you twiddling your thumbs and burning through your budget while waiting for their developers to catch up, we’ve got proprietary operating procedures that get our team up to speed faster than you can say “code!”

You see, at Buink, we’ve perfected the art of lightning-fast project onboarding. It’s all part of our commitment to delivering value right from the get-go. Sure, the first task might take a tad longer as our developer finds their groove, but trust us, it’s worth it. Why? Because we’ve seen firsthand how wasting time and money on endless onboarding can leave Clients feeling more lost than a sock in the dryer.

So, as we reflect on this particular triumph, we can’t help but feel a sense of pride in what we’ve accomplished. Not only did we create a captivating landing page, but we also navigated the inevitable hurdles with grace, ensuring our client received the value they deserved. It’s moments like these that remind us why we love what we do.

If you’re curious to see the fruits of our labor, we invite you to check out the Laravel Website Maintenance landing page here. Remember, this is just a glimpse into the impressive tapestry of projects we’ve undertaken throughout our journey. There’s plenty more where that came from, and we can’t wait to tackle new challenges and create even more magic in the world of web development.

Canopy Design

In addition to crafting captivating websites, our design team has created a whole range of items, including neckties, socks, ads, slide shows, and even canopies. Who would have thought we’d end up in the realm of outdoor shade solutions? But hey, versatility is our middle name!

When it came to the canopy design project, we kicked off by immersing ourselves in the brand vision. We wanted to ensure that every element we designed seamlessly integrated with their overall image. As we brainstormed, sketched, and tinkered with ideas, we stumbled upon the idea of a subtle hexagon pattern gradient adorning the canopy’s top.

Now, we understand that the average passerby might not notice this intricate pattern immediately, but that’s the beauty of it. It’s the little design details that elevate a project from good to great. It’s like discovering a hidden treasure, only for those with a keen eye for aesthetics.

But that’s not all! We didn’t stop at just the pattern. We meticulously designed a crisp white line along the edge of the canopy, giving it a distinctive shape that sets it apart from the ordinary. It’s those thoughtful touches that make all the difference.

Now, we must admit, web development is our bread and butter. It’s where we thrive, bringing digital visions to life with code and creativity. But our designs have been turning heads and capturing hearts, luring more and more clients into our whimsical world of aesthetics.

So, while canopy design might not be our main gig, it serves as a testament to our unwavering commitment to delivering captivating and memorable experiences across a wide range of design realms. At Buink Web Development, we may not be your typical agency, but we are a merry band of developers and designers ready to take on any challenge that comes our way.

If you’re seeking a touch of our design magic for your next project, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re always up for sprinkling a bit of whimsy and elegance onto the canvas of your imagination. Let’s create something extraordinary together!