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.
