For the past few months I’ve been part of a team redesigning Sherlock Tech’s new website. SherlockTech Staffing is a boutique IT staffing and consulting agency for technical talent in Florida and other parts of the country.
I got involved with the project after running into a David Silverlight at the local WordPress meetup. I had worked with David many years ago and knew he was an excellent .Net and Silverlight developer so I was surprised to see him at a WordPress meetup. It turns out that David is working with WordPress now and was scouting out some plugin ideas for some of his sites. David introduced me to Alex Funkhouser Sherlock Tech’s President and I teamed up with Media In Sync and Steve Earle to work on the site.
In addition to re-platforming from a custom .NET/SQL CMS to WordPress, Sherlock had the following requirements:
- Support mobile devices
- Present a cleaner, more professional branding
- Integrate with social media, especially Sherlock Tech’s Facebook Page
- Integrate their website with a third-party recruiting application
Marsha Belinson, an Account Director with Sherlock served as the creative director/project manager for the redesign. Mobile support was a priority for Marsha and I recommended using a responsive design. I have been using the Genesis Theme framework from StudioPress for years and they had recently launched several new themes that were responsive. We selected the Genesis Streamline child theme and customized it to give Sherlock Tech their own unique branding.
Sherlock Tech uses a recruiting app called Sendouts to publish their open positions and track applicants. Sherlock wanted to use the Sendouts API to import open positions and add them as content on their new WordPress site. I created a custom post type to handle jobs and wrote a custom WordPress plugin to run each hour using the WP cron. The service pulls open jobs from Sendouts and synchronizes them with the existing custom posts on the WordPress site. Jobs are searchable on the Sherlock site and applicants then apply through the Sendouts app.
This was definitely one of the more challenging projects I have worked on in recent months. In my experience the key to a successful project is having good project leadership. Alex and Marsha provided clear direction on what they wanted and we launched on time and within budget.
Great work Rick! We really appreciate all of your excellent leadership and contribution to our project.
Sincerely,
Alex
I really enjoyed working with you. I hope we can do some more great stuff in the future!
Thank you., Steve