Case Studies

Designing and building a new website for Reliance Bank was a natural fit for Howard Development & Consulting. Much like us, they’re a local company that’s competing against national players by offering personalized service and a connection with their community.

We partnered with the strategy and design agency, BrandDemon, to bring to life a design that accomplished two primary goals:

• It presented the bank as a technically modern and full-service financial institution; and,
• It did so while visually anchoring the bank in the communities it serves.

Of course, being a smaller institution (albeit one that’s punching well above their weight), the cost of building a website of this scope had to remain economical.

• With over 65 individual pages, we worked with the design team to optimize the layouts of ten different templates that could be repurposed depending on the content of the page;
• We integrated two third-party online banking widgets — one for personal and one for business — as well as other third-party calculators; and,
• We planned a phased approach to development, launching with the client’s must-have items, then the balance over 30 days, and finally with planned enhancements on an ongoing basis — all by using the Scrum framework.

Being a bank, there were a number of compliance issues that we needed to accommodate for — and that were raised over the course of our development. Because of this, there were several times where we needed to make changes or add features mid-development. 

We also built and delivered smaller numbers of pages at a time (as opposed to the whole website at once) so that the bank’s compliance team could be reviewing them while we worked on the next batch. This concurrent workflow fit well within the Scrum framework, allowing for multiple teams and stakeholders to be working together, and didn’t impede our progress.

Finally, we created a series of instructional videos that walked the client through how to update the website through the admin themselves. This empowers them to make as many content changes as they need, especially rates (which can change daily), without incurring any additional development costs.

If you’re interested in working with us on your local project, you can get in touch with us here.

Since 2011, I’ve called the Denver metro area home and fallen in love with the beauty and spirit of Colorado. That’s given me and my team the opportunity to work with many well-known local organizations to deliver handcrafted WordPress and custom application development. Here are a few highlights from our work in Colorado…

Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment

We created four new web sites – two in English and two in Spanish – for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment in support of their 2020 flu and MMR vaccination campaigns. At a time when public health and preventative medicine were at the top of everyone’s mind and CDPHE was stretched thin by the COVID-19 pandemic, we delivered these four high-end, mobile-friendly web sites in just three weeks from start to finish.

Denver Preschool Program

The Denver Preschool Program makes quality preschool possible for all Denver families with 4-year-old children. Funded by a local sales tax approved by voters in 2006, DPP has provided over $122 million in tuition support to help more than 55,000 Denver children attend the preschool of their family’s choice.

We’ve been handling all web development for DPP since 2018, and during that time we’ve rebuilt their website as a lightning-fast, mobile-optimized WordPress site. We added an advanced mapping tool that allows parents to easily search and filter among more than 200 schools in the Denver area.

And most recently, we developed an easy-to-use, mobile-friendly online application tool to allow parents to apply for tuition credits through an online, completely paperless interface. The online tuition credit application and the web site are available in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic and Somali to ensure we’re serving the vast majority of Denver residents.

Colorado State University’s Rocky Mountain Student Media

Since 2016, we’ve built and managed the web properties for Colorado State University’s high-traffic student media sites, including The Rocky Mountain Collegian newspaper and the KCSUFM radio station. Our rebuild of the Collegian site dramatically improved its performance and speed, allowing the organization to sell more web advertising and pump those new funds back into educating the next generation of journalists.

We help the students and professional student-media business team at CSU manage all their web sites, ensure every site is running as snappily and securely as possible, and assist with a continuously flow of new design and development projects, all while helping students get their first taste of working with high-end web properties.

We’re proud to be a part of what makes Colorado great. If you’re interested in working with us on a local project, you can get in touch right here.

When the state of Colorado wanted to increase their vaccination rates, they embarked on a comprehensive advertising campaign — including two new websites, one for the flu vaccine and the other for the MMR vaccine. Our creative partners at Groundwrk completed the designs, then Howard Development & Consulting built the multilingual (English and Spanish) sites.

The websites themselves were relatively straightforward, but what was particularly challenging was the quick turnaround and the need to include multiple stakeholders at the government level. Any change or update also meant replicating it four times — one for each version of the website.

Generally speaking, the larger the client the slower the approvals and the more feedback that needs to be incorporated. However, we were able to work with Groundwrk to expedite the process, iterate quickly, and defer non-essential items until after launch to ensure that their deadlines were met and the campaign was in market.

The websites were up in three weeks. That’s amazing. That includes design and multiple rounds of iteration up to the day before launch. Your guys’ team was awesome in just saying, ‘Cool, we’ll get it to you on this day, ‘just so I could relate that to the client.

As part of our long-term partnership with Fit Small Business, we work with them to continually identify opportunities to save costs, increase productivity, or, like with the development of Fit Projects, both.

Fit Projects is Fit Small Business’ custom project management solution. As a company whose product is its content, Fit Small Business operates a complex article pipeline that includes each division of the business — editorial, business development, and SEO. As each magazine-style article progresses through the pipeline, users within each division are notified so they can complete their work in a timely and efficient manner.

Previously, Fit Small Business had been using a third-party tool to manage their content, but it fell short of their needs and came at a significant annual cost.

As a young company, we had to make the most of the third-party tools that were available and that we could afford — even if they didn’t fully meet our needs. That was the case with our project management application, which came at a cost of over $50,000 per year, but that failed to offer the level of customization and responsiveness that we needed to efficiently manage our day-to-day operations.

Because Howard Development & Consulting had partnered with Fit Small Business for so long, we were able to understand their workflows and where a technology solution could be tailored to improve them. We worked with their editorial and leadership team to conceive and develop an application that gave more visibility into the day-to-day operations of their business, from content ideation to post-production reporting, and that fully integrated with the other custom applications we have developed for them.

There were two primary challenges that we solved for: how to streamline the application to make their workflows more efficient and how to improve the user experience to increase adoption and usage.

As part of this process, we consulted with various stakeholders from different departments of the business. Through the Scrum process, they shared their most common use cases, pain points, and wish list of features that would make their day-to-day work easiest. We then took these inputs and merged them with our user experience expertise to design and develop an application that resolved their current needs and was scalable to adapt as they grew.

Rather than source a new tool, we opted to develop one in partnership with Howard Development & Consulting. This gave us the opportunity to rethink our processes from the ground up and how technology can best augment and support them. And, as our needs changed and grew, Rob and his team were there to support us — consulting with our team to enhance and improve the tool where we needed it most at each phase.

In version one of the application, we replicated the most widely used features of the third-party tool to minimize any disruptions during the transition. Then, we worked with the stakeholders to iterate on these features — refining them where needed and building new ones to fill any gaps.

The result was a simplified user interface that placed the information each user needed front and center, intuitive navigation that was based on their established workflows, integration with their other custom applications to aggregate project data, and a robust back-end that enabled administrators to add, edit, and delete as needed.

Many developers can build a website or application that has been well documented with clearly defined specifications. However, it takes a partner like Howard Development & Consulting to truly understand your business’ long-term needs and goals and how a technical solution can help you achieve them. Bridging the gap between business and technology with interdisciplinary thinking is where we do our best work. And like all of our clients, we work best when we’re involved in the full lifecycle of a project — from identifying the business opportunity, to ideation, and through the execution. 

We don’t just help our clients do the work, we partner with them to strategize what work needs to be done.

Rapidly growing businesses face unique challenges as they scale. For Fit Small Business, one of those challenges was consolidating and streamlining disparate sources of data to better inform their decision-making process.

Previously, they had used multiple third-party and in-house tools to store and retrieve data for their business. This caused three major challenges:

• In order to get a complete view of their data, they needed to access multiple tools. This took a lot of time, work, and resources from their Analytics team just to pull all the data. Then there was all the work to get that data into a format that they could work with.
• Using multiple sources of data often leads to issues with data integrity. This is a result of the poor and inconsistent organization across these tools, incorrect and redundant data entry, and more. 
• An inability to use their data to make better decisions and improve their company’s performance. Using these multiple sources of data was extremely inefficient. It resulted in delayed reporting and a decrease in confidence in their data and reports.

As a data-driven company, our decisions are only as good as what informs them. Having to compile data from multiple sources was both time-consuming and open to human error — and even then, it only told part of the story.

What Fit Small Business needed was a tool that would be a central location for all of their data, which would enable them to:

• Have a single point of access for their data
• Fix any data integrity issues
• Easily create reports for the company
• Create custom reporting tools, thereby reducing the overall amount of reporting they needed
• Draw insights and take action from their data to improve the company’s performance

This tool was called the Fit Pixel.

The Fit Pixel gives us a single point of access for all of our website data, from traffic to partners. It allows us to quickly create reports, respond to any anomalies, and gives us the visibility and insight we need to make the kind of smart and timely decisions that a tech company is expected to make.