Osijek Software City

This is not a normal eCommerce site. As a matter of fact, this is not an eCommerce site at all. Yes, you read that right. So, why is it in our portfolio?

First of, we are very proud to have this website in our portfolio. It’s a high level project for Osijek Software City – an NGO we started with our friends from Mono, Farmeron and Betaware to promote software development in our local community.

The story goes a couple of months back and it starts with a complete redesign of the visual identity for Osijek Software City. Like any other story of that kind, everyone hoped (and expected) complete redesign of web will quickly follow too. We didn’t want to let anyone down so after new visual identity was created, team for web redesign was formed.

Design was handled by Mono, and development by Inchoo. Our go to guys were Filip Svetlicic for front-end and Zoran Salamun for back-end.

There were several challenges associated with the project.

What seemed to be a simple task at first turned into a high level project in the end. It took over 200 hours to build this amazing (and huge) site!

Starting from scratch in June slowly turned into first wireframes by July and first screens by the end of August. Everything, design wise, which wasn’t included in the plan, was handled on the go.

Solution

Andrej, from Mono team, wanted the design to follow the visual identity. He put the accent on people, companies and events so that it’s visible and clear how open to the community we are.

Development follows the same principles.

The first thing you notice when you open the site is how clean it looks. Since the project is large and it will last a while, to give the CSS blocks more transparency and meaning, Filip, for front-end, used BEM (block, element, modifier).

When building it, he payed extra attention to details in typography. He made sure he’d create harmonious and balanced font sizing using the typographic scale and the vertical rhythm which is composed of the ratio between font size, line height and margins or padding. It was really important to put a strong emphasis on those so the front-end follows the clean looking design of the revamped visual identity.

From a back-end point of view, almost everything was made from scratch. Why? Because we wanted the community to be able to use it. Zoran “threw out” a whole bunch of the old plugins and created a new event system. He extended permissions from WordPress and made important custom functionalities. Every member is also a WordPress user and has his own profile, events are not related to a person (mentor or lecturer) no matter are they a member or not and some even have the options to update different company profiles, even though they are not members of the NGO – to name a few.

Zoran made sure to use WordPress best practices – that’s why everything is optimised and there’s no caching.

Results

Even though this is not an eCommerce project, here are the results which, once again, prove why are we proud to have the project listed here: