Josh Meeder

GYF.com Web Design and Relaunch

GYF.com New, Improved & Redesigned

Several years ago I was introduced to Grossman Yanak and Ford LLP, a Pittsburgh based top tier accounting firm. GYF is a massive company in the tax, accounting, ERP and advisory services industries. They had two sites that needed some web design work, their corporate Accounting and ERP Solutions technology divisions. With that direction, GYF.com and GYFerp.com were created.

GYF.com

The requirements of each site called for custom development and Pagelines DMS was selected to create the layout of the WordPress site installations. Pagelines DMS was a responsive, drag and drop editor that provided a great deal of design freedom. Unfortunately, Pagelines stopped supporting that plugin and eventually discontinued it entirely. This was a major concern as the vast majority of sites I had developed at that point.

Elementor: A New Tool for New Times

When Pagelines ceased to support it’s plugin, a new tools needed to be chosen fast. After lengthy research, narrowed the options done to BeaverBuilder and Elementor. Both plugins were responsive drag-n-drop editors. Both had long running history and good reviews. Ultimately, I choose Elementor. Elementor had a wide array of templates, features and add-ons.

Great Clients Make All The Difference!

The people at Grossman Yanak & Ford are great people. They know their job and industry, but more impressively, they are fantastic to work with. The head of the marketing department lead the project internally. Through the process, she quickly became very skilled with WordPress and Elementor. Educating and empowering my clients is a core tenant of the work I do. Our partnership was enjoyable and productive.

Over the last year, I have migrated all of my clients to Elementor. It was time to begin the conversion for GYF’s ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Technology group’s site. The ERP site was chosen because it was smaller and more manageable. GYFerp.com took about two months to rebuild from the ground up. It was well received and successful. Then it was on to the main site.

GYFerp.com

The Redesign and Build Over The Quarantine

The project kicked off shortly before COVID hit and the world went crazy. This ended up being very fortuitous. Redesigning a site of this size was a massive undertaking. The design needed to current, easily navigable and complimentary to the brand, as well as the new GYFerp.com site.

Grossman Yanak and Ford is a Pittsburgh based firm with an international reach. The site’s visual language needed to speak to the local influence, as well as the national and international markets they serve. While GYF serves large and small companies, they focus on the personal relationship and education of their clients.

My assistant Milo and I dove into the design process. With the GFYerp site fresh in our minds, we confirmed the site’s needs and structure with our clients. Due to the quarantine, we had some time to develop at a reasonable and consistent pace. This permitted all of us to really explore the needs and depth of each topic. The result was a rich, deep and complex site build. Here are few of the numbers from the build.

76 Pages
470 Blog Posts
926 Images
25 Custom Templates
24 Custom Pop Ups
27 User Profiles
17 Plugins (more than a typical installation)

Congratulations & Lessons Learned

Grossman Yanak & Ford LLP has a beautiful new site, and a very affective one. I want to thank the team that made it possible and congratulate them on a job well done. There were a lot of new challenges and requirements needed for this site. Each site build improves our skills and knowledge. This was a great project and definitely up levels our work. It was a pleasure to work on this project and I am proud of the work my team delivered.

If you are interested in talking about you developing or redesigning your site, please contact me to discuss the project.