BUCK

The Buck Starts Here

Consulting firm Buck offers technology-based solutions to help companies help their employees—health, wealth, and career advancement services included. When Buck came to us, though, they needed help themselves. They had no brand to speak of. And no website.
What they needed: a site that was professional but approachable, information-rich but streamlined.

Plan of ATTCK

We partnered with Wolff Olins, a corporate branding consultancy, to tackle the task. Together, we engaged in highly collaborative discussions about the interactions, animations, and implementations that would make the site stand apart. For their part, Wolff Olins provided comprehensive brand guidelines, user experience strategy, and beautifully cohesive designs—all the tools we needed to launch into development.

Art and Craft

The homepage of Buck.com offers plenty to catch the eye. Up top, an auto-play video offers a breezy tour through a shared workspace. Hover over the items in the header and you’ll see them turn from white to black as the dropdowns lower. Then scroll past the names of the subpages to see the arrows next to them bounce slightly to the right. Further down the page, blocks of text fill with splashy gradients of color as your cursor passes by.

These effects, achieved through CSS3 animations, align with the overall aesthetic of the site—highly graphic, with richly saturated colors and stark black and white contrasts. Artful but subtle, they create an engaging experience that doesn’t detract from the content.

In Other Words

With offices in six countries, Buck needed their site to feature location-specific multi-language support. We developed the site to display regional content based on the user’s geolocation, and visitors can choose to read in three dialects of English—American, Canadian, and British—as well as Canadian French. That means Quebecois in Cambridge can read U.K.-based content in their native tongue, and American fans of British spelling can enjoy information about the IRS with an English flavor.

Powered by WordPress

We leveraged WordPress, our content management system of choice, to build Buck’s website using FLEX, our proprietary layout system. Why WordPress? Because it’s equipped with enough functionality for the most complex projects, and it’s the perfect platform for sites that are robust, scalable, and streamlined. Most importantly, it offers us—and our clients—custom experiences that are remarkably easy to adapt. And thanks to our custom layout system, the process is easier than ever. Using a row-and-column paradigm and drag-and-drop functionality, it makes the process of inputting content confusion-free, preventing costly errors. Our philosophy: We create sites, but our clients own them.

Site for Sore Eyes

Our collaboration with Wolff Olins bore beautiful fruit: a striking, sophisticated website that met our client’s technical needs while also offering users an intuitive, inviting experience. Those who know our work should expect no less.