Fallon London

About Fallon London

Fallon London is a creative advertising agency working across all channels and categories. In the last 4 years they have won numerous awards including a “Grand Prix” for Print and Film at Cannes and a “Cannes Lion” for digital.

Overview

Fublo was approached by Fallon to build a new corporate website using WordPress as the content management system. The Fallon team’s major goals were to present the agency’s work in clean and easily manageable site, with excellent navigation and a slice of uniqueness with an app that would allow all visitors to “choose a guide” to theme the site.

We provided Fallon with:

• a bespoke theme to extend WordPress to capture all the information from their projects;
• a Solr search engine install to help visitors find the work that they are interested in;
• a guides app which allows each visitor to choose a guide to theme their site experience;
• and custom and extended plugins to tie the whole development together.

The project was run over three phases: specification; prototyping and development, with full hand-over of the site completed at the beginning of April.

Fluid theme with adaptive content

After wire-framing and prototyping the new site, we worked on a design that would present Fallon’s excellent work using a structured, flexible layout that worked seamlessly across a variety of platforms and interfaces: desktop, tablet and mobile.

Video players are dynamically resized inside Fallon’s fluid theme with MooTools.

We used Andy Taylor’s 1140 grid system to build a widgetised theme and augmented it with a MooTools snippet to make videos rescale in the same way as images do in the framework – fluidly with no black boxes.

Guides site theming app

Fallon's guides application allows visitors to select a from different designs for the site.

We created a guides application for the site with MooTools and integrated it into WordPress with its own plugin. The application allows visitors to change the design of the site to a guide of their choice and remembers the selection between visits.

In the CMS we designed and built a custom data type for each guide to include the theme information for each guide in the CMS so that the Fallon team would be able to create and update their guides.

Custom work structure

To incorporate the client / brand / project / work data schema designed with Charlie, a Fallon information architect, we extended Fallon’s theme with custom types and fields to capture their work data. We built the linked hierarchy with Silviu-Cristian Burca’s “Posts 2 Posts” plugin. In addition, that all tied in with a custom permalink structure to keep Fallon’s work nicely organised in the URLs too.

Integrated Solr search

Apache Solr provides the search functionality and related items lists on Fallon’s new site.

Solr is a fantastic search server and gives excellent power to present accurate search results ranked dynamically as required by the user. We started with Matt Weber’s “Solr for WordPress” plugin, extended it to operate with the Fallon custom work structure, added custom queries to find related work items and provide endless scrolling in all search results on the site.