Project Overview
In 2013, I was already coding heavily and decided to get a vanity domain - html5.bg. A few years later, Flash was "slashed" by Apple - they refused to support it in their Safari browser. A couple of years later, the perfect moment for this domain to get alive came.
In 2017, I started working closely with Delve on a very specific project: productizing HTML5 banners for large Google Advertisers through DoubleClick Studio (now 360 Video and Display). While I may cover this in a separate project, as it is a whole other universe, it is worth noting that by this time, we had decided to build an internal banner factory to serve other clients as well.
I really wanted the site to resonate with the core activity we will sell - HTML5 banners and experiences. Thus, I wanted to have very slick and interactive design, showcasing our capabilities. With the help of our designer, we made four Lego™ alike cubicles to represent the core concepts of the business - each one with a looped animation, heh, just like an HTML5 banner.
I also wanted to have super smooth and straight-forward process of sending us a request. Thus the web-form was designed to have pre-defined options, and to be just a few clicks away, and at the end - the user even had access to Dropbox request link, where they could upload the assets for the banners (turned to be quite useful for existing clients, launching new request).
Another pretty funny and neat trick was with the different pages, we have used to advertise our services - the so called industry pages. All looking the same, but each with:
- Different message - both in English and Bulgarian;
- Different banner images, which even had randomised animated items on refresh 😄
This gave us a perfect opportunity to touch on different industries through super focused advertising campaigns. See an example here and below:
The site has solid analytics and marketing layers, which are common for such projects, as it is advertised throughout different platforms.
Key technical decisions:
- LAMP Stack: Required for a standard WordPress website. For hosting, we're using WP Engine, which performs well and offers flexibility, security, and automation for a variety of processes.
- Custom WordPress theme: We always build our themes ourselves, and in this one we put quite an effort to make it super interactive, heavily relating on web animations.
- GSAP animations: We use very light, balanced scroll animations with GSAP to enhance the user experience. In addition all of the different visuals you will come across the site are "made live" with GSAP Business back in time - the very same technology we have used for making the banners themselves.
- MongoDB Atlas: Least but not last, we've decided to organize all our brand communications, including this one around notification automation, thus we get all the requests saved to MongoDB database, and an automated notification over email.