Anova Consulting Group

In the early 2000s, Anova Consulting entered the market offering cutting edge Win / Loss Analysis research. In 2011, they even wrote the first book about the subject. Later on, they developed their own custom application to efficiently manage and interpret Win / Loss data. This was when they partnered up with Taylor Design, where I worked at the time, to design and develop a new modern website that matched their expertise and dominance in the market. Anova then came back in 2019 to have us help them refresh their design once again. I handled the custom development of both versions of the website.

Industry

  • Corporate
  • Data Analysis

Tech Stack

  • WordPress
  • PHP
  • Bootstrap

Project Link

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Project Goals

The client wanted a design that better reflected their position in the industry. The design should make them stand out from competitors and help solidify them as the industry leader. As part of this effort, they wanted the code and design to conform to strict SEO standards so they would gain position in search engine ranks.

Technology and Build Choices

As SEO was an incredibly important aspect of the job, I worked closely with their SEO consultant to ensure we stuck to the most current guidelines when it comes to search engine optimization while developing the website templates. We used WordPress and the Yoast SEO plugin to fully optimize everything according to the consultants suggestions. On top of that, I coded the website to utilize a very heavy caching layer, as well as using coding techniques designed to greatly improve load times and other performance benchmarks for website visitors. Google looks heavily at website performance as well as mobile friendliness when it ranks your website in their search results.

Development Process and Challenges Faced

For the initial website development back in ~2014, I used an HTML first approach before we moved it within WordPress. Once in WordPress, I worked closely with their SEO consultant to make sure all the website images, content and other SEO data was optimized according to their specifications. Once the SEO aspect was taken care of during content population, I then went back into the back end of the website and tested various caching and server level optimizations to decrease page load times further. When we were happy with the results, we moved the environment to their production server and launched.

In the most recent refresh, the main challenge was using the version of Bootstrap we had built the website with originally to save on costs. While it was an older version of the framework, it was still perfectly relevant and useable by today's standards, so I took the foundation of what was there and added on more modern development techniques as needed. By doing this, I was able to avoid a complete code restructure to utilize the modern version of the framework's newer utility class based CSS methods. This saved the client time and money.

When the refresh launched we moved the client to a more WordPress oriented webhost that had more technologies at its disposal that further streamlined the performance of their website. We worked with the same SEO consultant on the refresh as well so further SEO refinements were done.

Project Results

In both instances, the Anova Consulting websites were launched with a strong focus on SEO optimization. The Anova team was able to manage their website successfully with the design and WordPress template system we built for them. The template consisted of many custom touches such as custom page widgets that were embeddable in sidebars as well as in the middle of the content, a custom theme settings page, and custom tailored field inputs for different content types for easier no-code management.

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Let’s build something together

Photo of me, Chris Yerkes