Reinventing the
Public Face of a Unicorn in 10 Weeks

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Industry

  • Human Resources & Employment

Services

  • Architecture
  • Web development
  • Design implementation
  • Content & SEO migration
  • Marketing automation implementation

Technology

  • WordPress
  • GreenSock

TL;DR

  • Flexible Gutenberg-based WordPress website
  • High-end animation-rich design implementation
  • Heavy content migration
  • Parallel and synchronized design & development processes

The challenge

Papaya Global is an award-winning global payroll organization serving thousands of customers worldwide. Though they are listed among the world’s leading tech companies, its website was outdated and needed a redesign that told its story and underscored its reputation as a global technology powerhouse.

Papaya Global came to us on a recommendation from a past client. They were most concerned about their homepage animations and knew they needed a highly specialized team to accomplish the task. Development needed to happen while the design phase was still in motion.

We created a POC to demonstrate this functionality on a small portion of the homepage to demonstrate our capabilities in this area. This sealed the deal, and we got down to work.

  • Fast Turnaround, Zero Downtime
    The project had numerous complexities, but the most significant was that they needed it completed within ten weeks—without downtime for their customers.
  • Experience in Web Animations
    The initial design implemented an animation-rich landscape, and they required a developer with experience in this area. However, the greatest challenge here was the phased nature of the project, as some of the design was handed over at the outset and the rest was rolled out gradually during the development phase.
  • Seamless Content Migration
    The old site—more than 1000 pages of content that continued to update daily—had to remain operational during development to ensure seamless operations for their global customer base.
  • Many Stakeholders with Their Own Concerns
    Papaya is a massive company with multiple stakeholders, each with different needs and critical concerns.
  • Minimize Dev Resources in the Aftermath
    Though the site design and development were highly complex, they wanted to be able to self-manage when it was complete to remain as independent as possible.
solution

The Solution

  1. Accurate planning and technical analysis: We started by analyzing the different pages from an “atomic design” perspective to understand the right way to move forward with development from a holistic viewpoint. The timeline was created to address the challenge of the phased design delivery as we did not have all design elements in place on day one. This allowed the development and design to move forward in parallel without delay.
  2. GreenSock (GSAP) animation library: We used GSAP to support the complex homepage animation to minimize browser inconsistencies and significantly accelerate the timeline.
  3. Implemented a robust migration infrastructure that was able to migrate new content at different stages of the project. As a result, we could delay the content freeze on the customer’s end to only a week before launch.
  4. Prioritization was critical during the analysis phase to ensure we addressed all stakeholder concerns. We identified regions of the site most likely to elicit feedback and need more iterations and delivered these as quickly as possible. After gathering all input from the different stakeholders, we prioritized accordingly and worked with them until we achieved consensus.
  5. Reusability and comptonization were vital: Every piece of content was created as a standalone component using Gutenberg Blocks with its different variants. This approach allowed us to create new pages and templates for future use cases that could be leveraged without dev resources.

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