Jewelry website proposal
Have you created any web/mobile developments for jewelry, fashion or lifestyle brands? If so, please detail what type of development was done and please include portfolio examples.
Yes, there were at least a couple of Drupal projects in this field. Both are archived currently, but I think we have one of them in our portfolio.
It's hard to believe that this project was done around 7 years ago. Even today the screenshots look impressive.
We worked on a couple of fashion-related websites as well.
Overall I believe an experienced developer who can communicate well with the customer can deliver great results regardless the previous experience in a specific field.
What is the most complex development you have done? What were the most challenging elements?
Well, we worked on websites, and in general that's not a rocket science of development :-)
But there were a couple unusual and relatively complex projects.
There was a penny auctions project where we had to implement a number of custom mechanisms including our "quickcron" module which runs on schedule just like cron, but much more often (say, every second).
As for challenging elements - I don't remember anything extraordinary, but we definitely face the challenges every day.
The very common challenge is to make Drupal and its modules work as expected :-) If you are familiar with Drupal development you surely know what I mean.
Just an example of work that we're doing right now - we're porting a large site from D7 to D8. And there is a module on D7 website that we're trying to migrate to D8 - workbench moderation. If you check the module page, the authors say "do not use this module with D8", cause there's another core module for that. But that core module doesn't provide the same functionality. Also, it lacks a number of important views and features. So there's no quick way of migrating it and now we have to invent something.
And that's just a typical situation, it happens almost every day.
And I believe these small everyday challenges build up to a bigger general Drupal development challenge.
Are you able to help shape concepts into structure, code and UI/UX or do you prefer to have completed specs only? If you have taken concepts and guided a development, please give a brief overview.
Although we completed hundreds of projects I think there were only 2 or 3 cases where we had completed specs.
And there were many-many cases when there were some specs which we had to reiterate many times before they were ready to be used for the development.
So a good part of our work is the analysis and communications.
Right now we're working on the project where all the designs were provided and some specs were captured as JIRA user stories, but it appears that it's only around 20% of the actual requirements and we had to do many Q&A sessions with the client. Even right now, at the final sprint of the project we still discuss some questions.
So, while we'd prefer to work based on completed specs the reality is that it's usually impossible, so we're ready to work with what you have and provide our recommendations.