CommonPlaces Wins Outstanding Mobile Development Award

The Web Marketing Association has honored CommonPlaces, Inc. with the 2014 MobileWebAward for Outstanding Achievement in Mobile Development. The award went to the team which designed and developed the corporate website for http://www.axeda.com/ in the category of Best Computer: Software Mobile Website. This is CommonPlaces’ second major honor from the WMA this year. The Manchester, NH based Digital Agency was previously honored with the 2014 Best Medical Equipment Website for their design of the Capsule Tech website.

Axeda is a sophisticated cloud-based service for managing connected products and machines. They’ve also been a long-standing client of CommonPlaces, who built several sites for them years ago in Drupal. Recently, Axeda saw the need to give their corporate site a facelift.

Primarily, the objective was to provide an easier content management experience for administrators with a clean, sleek appearance. They wanted visitors to scroll down their page, telling the Axeda story, focusing on Axeda’s industry leading online presence in the M2M and Cloud Platform space. In providing an easier content management experience for administrators, CommonPlaces urged a switch to a responsive design to take advantage of demands from mobile users. They worked with Axeda to convert and update various charts, tables, and other valuable content to a scalable, responsive format. The result is a website which meets, and often exceeds, the expectations of both parties.

Michael Reich, COO for CommonPlaces, noted one particularly interesting element to this honor. “We didn’t follow the traditional best practices approach to designing a mobile site,'” he said with a grin. “Traditionally, developers build the mobile site first, and then scale out to desktop size. We’ve built many, many responsive designs in the past, so we took all that knowledge and built this desktop site, reskinned it, re-themed it, and made it responsive. I certainly see the irony in receiving a Mobile Web Award for a site built, essentially, in reverse.'”

The talented team cited with this honor include:

• Web designer and developer ‘- Amanda Downie
• Web designer and developer ‘- Lemuel Santos
• V.P. of Operations ‘- Michael Reich
• President & CEO ‘- Ben Bassi

The Web Marketing Association is comprised of a volunteer staff of marketing, Web design, PR, and online advertising professionals, and is the premier award recognition program for Website developers and marketers worldwide. Because of the explosion in recent years of mobile technology, the WMA decided to separate the Mobile awards from their traditional Web Award competition, singling out the ”growth and creativity in this space.'”