A corporate website for Wirtualna Polska Holding (WPH), one of the largest Polish Internet media and e-commerce companies, is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
About Project
A corporate website for Wirtualna Polska Holding (WPH), one of the largest Polish Internet media and e-commerce companies, is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
The portal has been designed as a showcase service for the entire holding of the Wirtualna Polska group. The corporate website has been divided into 3 parts:
WP Holding – a part of the website presenting the entire WP capital group with descriptions of individual companies that are a part of the Holding;
WP Media – a part of the corporate website describing the largest company of WP Holding;
WP Investor – some information for WPH’s shareholders on the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
Old version
The previous version of the website had been designed and implemented by an external company Ideo. The Ideo company prepared a dedicated CMS system – Edito for Wirtualna Polska – including the corporate website project. The company – as an external partner – was responsible for the service and support of the corporate website for WPH, i.e. technical support, website development and its expansion.
Unfortunately, each change in the front-end application entailed a high valuation of an external company and a long waiting time for the change implementation. Unfortunately, the costs of cooperation with an external client significantly exceeded the benefits.
The following arguments prevailed in favour of resigning from cooperation with an external client:
the high cost of IT service maintenance, which resulted in every change being priced very highly by an external client;
the CMS, which was to support the management and editing of content on the website, was outdated, non-functional and limited in functionality;
the external company did not develop a dedicated CMS to the progress of competitive solutions;
all the data was stored on an external server as the property of an external client;
outdated design; the company has not made any visual changes since implementing the website in 2015.
Goals
- the cost reduction of IT service maintenance with an external customer;
- IT service for a corporate website based on WP’s internal resources;
- technical service and maintenance and website development need to be handled by dedicated internal employees of the company;
- implementation of the service based on WP media company’s CMS;
- implementation of a visually modern website.
The most important conditions for creating a new corporate website were:
low cost of software development;
fast time of implementation of a new website.
Wirtualna Polska Holding did not have enough human resources to build a front-end application from scratch and did not want to involve its IT department extensively. To tackle this issue, WP has used some internal technical solutions.
The board members of WP suggested that the front-end applications should be based on an internal front-end library (from which WP has built its media services such as wiadomości.wp.pl, kobieta.wp.pl, finanse.wp.pl). Unfortunately, the Design System turned out to be functionally limited and did not meet the visual requirements that should be applied to build a professional corporate website. The company abandoned the first version of the project.
You can find the project of the old version of the corporate website below.
As the person responsible for the project, it was my responsibility to deliver a solution for a corporate website that a team of developers would implement quickly and inexpensively into production. I suggested to WP representatives to buy a ready Responsive Multi-Purpose HTML5 Template. The Template POLO was based on ready-made solutions enabling the IT team to deploy the front-end application to production.
As a designer, I prepared UI mockups based on ready-made components such as charts, calendars, data tables, top bar and many others. Thanks to the already finished Design Style, my work consisted mainly in:
Designing the information architecture (main menu). Navigation on the corporate website.
Preparation of texts and commissioning of copyrighting works for the Public Relations team.
Preparing graphics, photos, vector icons etc.
I quickly delivered a finished project to the client thanks to the use of ready-made front-end solutions.
Check the final project below and compare it with the production website (service, site). Most of the mockups are 1×1 compared to what I implemented.
