Partnerships between Creative and Development Agencies can be fraught with challenges, many of which can seem insurmountable, and that is before adding in the complexity of building a dynamic and engaging website in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). The experts at Skull & Raven Solutions have scaled these mountains many times and would like to share a handful of the ways we have found success in our partnerships with Creative Agencies.
More than just your pretty pictures
You have a creative vision, and it is a lot more than a collection of fancy looking Figmas or exquisite XD’s. We want to dig deep and understand your underlying motivation. You have made a host of aesthetic choices, and we want to come alongside your creative team and buy-in to their design.
How do we manage this? For starters, our team likes art! While not being artists ourselves, we find inspiration in many forms of artistic expression. In fact, the week this S&R Insight is intended to go live, the author of it will be traveling to a Shakespeare festival.
Art is not done in a vacuum, so we want to hear and see what inspired your team. We want to draw inspiration from the same channels, regardless of if it is some competing brand’s website, a piece of fine art, or a collection of photographs.
We also want to understand who the intended audience of the website is going to be. A site for B2B electronics sales and a site for personal auto insurance are going to have two very different audiences. Having this understanding will not only help us see your vision, but aid us on the implementation side, as we can anticipate common user interactions to ensure special attention is given to those pieces of functionality. Additionally, knowledge of the userbase can help us post-launch as we build out robust analytics and personalize experiences for specific targeted audiences.
Form into Functionality
A common misconception when it comes to developing a solution for a Content Management System, and especially for AEM, is that it is impossible to fully implement the interactivity and robustness of a design. That couldn’t be further from the truth, at least when it comes to what Skull & Raven can build. Our attention to detail and technical prowess allows us to maintain design fidelity while building dynamic, robust, and configurable applications in AEM.
We feel that by having a firm grasp on your intentions for the site, we can take your vision and successfully translate it into the functional requirements necessary to guide our development. In other words, bring us your parallax scrolling, unique carousels, and pixel perfect mobile-first designs, because we want to bring them to life.
Speaking Technically
How will we do that exactly? We have extensive experience building web applications, and when it comes to sites in AEM, we know the Adobe technologies inside and out! We don’t only know Adobe’s tech stack well, but also know what complimentary technologies work best with AEM implementations and have the know-how to successfully leverage them to expedite the development process.
This includes the obvious, such as extending WCM Core’s base functionality, but also knowing which ACS AEM Commons modules to make use of, and what frontend NPM packages can best fulfill our technical needs.
And don’t forget the authors
While a lot of focus is given to the functionality surrounding the end-users of a website, one group of users is often overlooked: the Content Authors. These are the users who are tasked with creating meaningful and engaging content for the website, and who will use the authoring tools in AEM to do so. Their lives are hard enough, and we at Skull & Raven pride ourselves on creating authoring experiences that are incredibly powerful, but also extremely easy to use.
In fact, I have personally had urgent zoom/slack calls with authors who just used a new piece of functionality that had been built, and it seemed too easy to author something so complex so quickly. They were so used to fighting AEM that they assumed they had done something incorrectly. In actuality, we had thought through the authoring experience in an effort to make their lives easier, and were so successful in that area, that AEM had become inconceivably easy to use.
Accessible to all
We believe that the ability to access and interact with the web is a fundamental human right, and as such, websites must be built so that they are fully accessible and usable by everyone. The implementation of your creative vision is no different. The applications we build follow ADA and WCAG guidelines to not only ensure compliance, but promote inclusive and accessible experiences for everyone.
Yes, but does it all work?
We would be remiss if we didn’t touch on the Quality Assurance and Testing practices we follow. Everything we deliver has been thoroughly tested to not only ensure that the application functions as expected, but cleanly handles the unexpected as well.
We do this in three parts: unit testing, functional testing, and visual testing. First, all backend code has the appropriate unit tests written for it, and all must pass successfully for the application to deploy. Second, all functionality is robustly tested manually, and may also have automated tests created for it so that the functionality can be tested as part of the deployment process. Finally, we strive for pixel perfect implementations of designs, because otherwise, we have failed to maintain the design fidelity that we were striving for.
All this ensures that the end-product lives up to your original designs and vision.
Let’s link up
Now that we have covered how we can work together to successfully deliver on your creative vision, we should really link up so we can begin building on your vision.
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