Simian Climb

Project

Web App

Indoor climbing is a growing sports market with a committed fanbase and an Olympics debut to look forward to in 2021. The folks at startup simianclimb.com are passionate about the sport and see a gap in the market for their product. The team began talking to us last year.

We agreed that a web app based on Microsoft technologies and running on an Azure database would deliver the best project prototype. The localised prototype attracted substantial interest from the climbing community in this area. Not long ago we followed up the prototype with an MVP, which is now live. The MVP is currently being rolled out to an expanded list of climbing centres.

The project required extensive use of the latest HTML and CSS to show marked handholds on a background climbing wall image, as well as a comprehensive understanding of the PayPal API to deliver both fixed and recurring billing options. We also included a small custom font set called Simian.

One of the challenges of the project was to deliver an app-like experience in the browser. Certainly the latest HTML and CSS help here. We also use our favourite layout framework Foundation (this time in its standalone form, rather than built into FoundationPress for WordPress projects). A considerable amount of testing across mobile devices was baked in to the project plan to ensure the best possible results for all phone users.

As the simianclimb.com founders themselves have a background in IT and project management, our role was to provide the programming, database administration and technical advice. Design work (assisted by Designatron), visual identity, project management and comprehensive testing was done by client. This is a stricter separation of roles than we are used to, but an enjoyable and more collaborative way of working. It has been a tremendously rewarding project to work on.

Client comments:

We picked WD4D out of a shortlist of suppliers to build our prototype because of the flexibility in approach and because we had no idea how to realise our concept – communication was therefore key. Having a local supplier to work through our solution definitely helped solve many of our obstacles through the prototype and MVP versions.

The quality of code and the professional, conscientious approach to development meant our test and fix phases have been very quick. We found WBS to be very attentive to our business requirements. This has been refreshing, as we have had experience where the main focus has been on delivering code rather than understanding the whole story and purpose.

We’re really pleased with our MVP site and can’t wait to take it out into the climbing community!

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