What was the scope of their involvement?
They did a complete redesign of our company website, a mobile-responsive site which gets about a million visits a month. The site is a tool for people who are searching for autos, mortgages, checking accounts, and other financial services, as well as a resource for existing members who are looking for self-service assistance. It was basically a start from scratch. We implemented a Spanish translation because we serve a predominantly Hispanic market.
Wakefly did a thorough job of vetting our specifications. We clearly drove what we were looking for in terms of the overall design and feel and usability. Our main requirements were user-friendly and mobile-first contemporary design with a journey involving minimal clicks, along with the Spanish translation and scalable development for Kentico, our CMS platform. We wanted it to be interactive, ADA-compliant, and optimized for search engines. We have some third parties we work with. All of those specifications were provided to them and they came back with recommendations.
We provided the content, but they assisted us ad hoc and created some content we needed. They did all the code development and built it within Kentico for us. We used a lot of out-of-the-box functionality, but they built a custom mortgage estimator for us, which I believe was done in jQuery. For the mortgage estimator, they loaded basically all the details from our pricing engine so it can recommend products with an estimated rate and payment. They introduced several enhancements, such as centralizing all of our disclosures in our footnotes throughout the site and automating how we report rates.
We implemented workflow management because in our we're a heavily regulated industry, so having a separation of responsibilities between who can create approved content and push the content live into the production environment is critical to us. They built a workflow on the backend that would manage that, which was quite efficient. They also helped us quite a bit through consultation. We hosted our own site, but they helped us set up our environments to make sure that we had installed everything properly on our end. They did that at no additional cost.
What is the team composition?
I had a primary project manager, Corey (Lead Project Manager, Wakefly). She did a fabulous job and she was our main point of contact. Steve (Web Developer) attended all of our weekly project calls, but I think he had other people he was coordinating with. Dean (CEO and Co-Founder) was also a point of contact and participated almost as the executive stakeholder. It was those three people that I interfaced with. But I know that there were others involved. There was probably an army of people working on our site that I wasn't exposed to.
How did you come to work with Wakefly?
We went through an extensive RFP process. That process alone probably took six months. But we vigorously vetted several different providers, with the requirement that they all had to be experienced with Kentico. We started out with a list of 10, narrowed it down to six after some preliminary phone calls, and then after a phone interview, narrowed it down to the top three. We did in-person interviews based on their RFP and then chose Wakefly.
Because we’re so regulated, and based on prior experiences, we required US-based developers. We have an environment where people were having to VPN, and we restrict access through a VPN, so everybody on the team was based in the US.
How much have you invested with them?
We spent between $150,000–200,000.
What is the status of this engagement?
We worked with them from January 2018 through July 2019.
The redesign has received praise from customers and internal stakeholders for its improved usability. Wakefly, Inc. led an effective workflow from start to finish thanks to their timeliness, constant communication, and willingness to improve on their work without question.