Built By Giants

Portfolio

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  RedUrban / Volkswagen

  Working with digital creative agency Red Urban, we designed and built a content delivery system to power cross-country marketing campaigns for Volkswagen Canada.

  Geek Translation

  We designed and engineered custom relational databases used by Volkswagen to handle user registrations, integrated with a separate CRM system and provided regional usage metrics. Due to restrictions on our deployment servers we were unable to work with any pre-existing MVC frameworks. So we built our own (not-so-humbly named MarkMVC) on an ultralight codebase designed for speed and flexibility.

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  DesignStor

  DesignStor, a visualization studio based in downtown Toronto, wanted a highly customized and content-focused site to showcase their brilliant visualization projects. The website was part of an overall company re-brand, and we worked with their design and marketing experts to develop a unique and quirky aesthetic. DesignStor wanted a highly interactive user experience, and a simple content management system to manage their data. But that’s not all! We also built a migration tool to seamlessly move content from their local customer relationship management system into their web platform.

  P.S. We also built a mobile site with a touchscreen-optimized interface.

  P.P.S. We did it all in six weeks. (Then we slept).

  Geek Translation

  This project really pushed our geek cred. This was a heavily custom job that had to be mostly coded from scratch. We realized early on that a third-party CMS would not work, so we built our own atop CakePHP. We established staging servers and used an SVN workflow to promote files (alas, no Git or Mercurial on live environment!). We also wrote a custom migration script to import delimited data from their CRM into our web database. Additionally, we integrated a Wordpress blog alongside CakePHP with some neat htaccess/mod_rewrite tricks and a custom skin. Highly interactive front-end design maxed out our jQuery chops. Mobile site integrated into CakePHP framework and activated via browser headers and cookies.

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  MacLaren McCann / General Motors

  Built by Giants co-founder Mark worked on a variety of projects with Toronto agency MacLaren McCann, providing web services to General Motors Canada, and helped engineer a full redesign and restructuring of the website. When the new GM.ca went live in October 2009 it launched with zero known bugs and a 300% performance increase. Mark also architected a variety of online campaigns and built several internal tools used for content management and data migrations.

  Geek Translation

  The General Motors site contains a massive amount of data and much of it needed to be restructured for the new site. Mark wrote a series of automation scripts and regular expressions to streamline this workflow and saved weeks of labour-hours in the process. Several smaller sections on the GM site needed small content management tools for internal data management. We used a variety of open source software to assemble content tools that were simple, powerful and quick to develop.

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  CESO-SACO

  We worked with Canadian non-profit CESO-SACO to modernize their website and build an interactive community for their 3,000+ volunteers. They also needed an engaging design and a powerful content management system which would enable them to offer a wide variety of online-based services.

  It all started with a comprehensive planning stage to balance the needs of internal functions and establish an internal workflow. We then worked with the senior managers to architect a site that met their requirements with a tight, cohesive structure. Then we designed and built their site using an enterprise level content management system, and handed the keys over to a happy client.

  Geek Translation

  CESO had an old website built on a basic CMS that did not provide the functionality needed to launch major online campaigns. We chose Kentico CMS to give them the flexibility they needed, and also built an internal user portal and imported over 3,000 user accounts from QuickBase CRM into the internal system. Simple implementation of Google Data API to replace an interactive Flash world map with a Google Map. Finally, in order to avoid the headaches and unreliability of a shared hosting solution, we launched the site on a fully-managd Rackspace Cloud server.

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  BCN.tv

  Toronto-based corporate broadcasting company BCN.tv approached us to revitalize their website with a fresh new look and a reliable content management system. They also wanted the ability to provide on-demand video content to their clients. Built By Giants built the new website with an enterprise-level content management system, and then created a media service that allows clients to access videos at any time. The site launched in November 2010 and has been happily serving video content ever since.

  Stream on.

  Geek Translation

  BCN.tv had an existing website built on a ColdFusion system with minimal flexibility, and a hosting solution not capable of handling heavy video data or traffic spikes. We started by building a Kentico CMS solution with a simple, minimalist design. We also incorporated an on-demand video service (accommodating files up to 1 Gb) and an FTP + SQL import mechanism for easily deploying media. Finally, we launched the site on a Rackspace Cloud server to handle data load and traffic scalability.

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  JR Sheetz

  We were approached by independent New York based filmmaker JR Sheetz to produce a portfolio website. All the videos were hosted on Vimeo and he wanted to integrate these into a website with custom content. This in itself was not a big problem -- but delivering the project in one week sure was!

  Geek Translation

  This was a simple project technically, but delivering it on an immediate schedule gave us a good challenge. We had to work with an existing hosting solution that did not support .NET or Python, so we opted for PHP-based SilverStripe. We had to integrate Vimeo content into the website, which we accomplished with some API calls on top of SilverStripe's RestfulService class. Finally a simple SVN workflow to promote files from development environment to staging and finally to production. Website in a week -- check!