• Social

Wizzo & Co.

Wizzo & Co. is a talent agency for the video production industry who required a website to serve as a home for their roster of talent. Some of the features they required were to provide a profile for the talent and allow users to create a shortlist of the talent that they would like to work with. 

I was involved in the production from the start, working alongside the designer to provide insight into how functionality could inform the design. We aimed to prioritise video content and delight the user with a fantastic video viewing experience and fun user interactions.  It also required 'shortlist' functionality, whereby users could add their desired talent to the list and email it to their desired person.

Technically speaking it was crucial that the videos and images loaded quickly yet remained high quality. This was achieved with image 'lazy loading' and by writing well structured JavaScript and PHP that was performant on the front-end and easy to maintain and expand on the backend. 

Overall, the the hard work culminated in a website that is a feast for the eyes and functions beautifully on all devices and browsers, a thought that was echoed by a very happy client. 
Role
Bespoke WordPress development
Technical challenges
Creating the best possible video viewing experience and adding shortlist functionality
Agency
The PHA Group
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Technical challenges.

A few of the interesting technical challenges on this project
Videos
The first technical challenge was creating a website that displayed videos beautifully and worked across all devices and browsers. This required careful research into what browsers would and would not allow when auto playing videos. Once that was established, custom JavaScript was used to create a video playlist functionality seen on the homepage. User interaction was key, allowing them to turn sound on or off and pause the video if required. It also had to update the video information when each video changed. Overall the homepage video provided as one of the most interesting and fun challenges to work on.
Shortlist functionality
The second technical challenge was the shortlist functionality, whereby users could add their desired talent to a shortlist which they could then email to their desired person. This needed to persist on the site after they had exited. I used cookies and regex to help achieve this so that, when a user added a talent to their shortlist it would grab the ID of the talent and store it as a cookie, ready for later use. The shortlist page would then loop over these cookies and display them. It then required the PHP mail function to send the shortlist to a specific email address depending on the category of the talent. The email also had to be styled and work across all email clients.
I would not hesitate in recommending Tom, he is personable, speedy, attentive and more importantly offers great ideas.
Lee Hickman, Wizzo & Co owner
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