How We Ended Up Building the Hardy Stud Website
It wasn’t an easy decision to close shop all day and visit Hardy Stud, but that ride of a lifetime turned out to be worth every minute for us and our hosts.
Legibra has a habit of getting in too deep. This was not the first time we fell in love with a client head over heels. Only this time – and we understand this may come out a little bit weird – we took things a notch higher and fell for …. wait for it … eer … horses.
It hasn’t always been this way, though. It started when we welcomed new staff members to our team in the middle of last year and we had to think of a place to go to celebrate the well-deserved expansion of the company. After massive deliberations, Hardy Stud, a horse riding complex in Karen, carried the day. So, to welcome the new unsuspecting guys, we simply took them for a ride.
Only our super cool CEO Felix Mbugua, actually a serial winner of horse riding competitions in Nairobi, had ridden a horse before. The rest of us publicly looked at home amid the thrill of putting carrots in the imposing mouths of the horses. Privately, however, we dreaded the thought of being at the mercy of animals who we were told weren’t very conversant with the national language. It is only after watching other people ride and come back unscathed that we took the leap of faith onto the unassuming beasts’ backs. Oh boy! It was amazing! Step by step we rode, holding the straps tightly as confidence built. Then to the air all caution we threw when the fun overpowered common sense. We had – by every unpolitical sense of the word – reached Canaan, the promised land, and by historically Biblical means.
Felix was quick to point out that he appreciated the fact that we went past our fears and had a great time; drawing comparisons of that experience with the challenges we’ll encounter on our day to day operations. Lesson 2: Horses have very advanced body language skills and can communicate in several other ways; something that is astoundingly crucial in a busy organization set-up like Legibra’s. Discipline is also something to take away from the rather docile animals, not just in following daily routines to the letter but also in learning one’s place in the hierarchy of things. Mercy Rop, ever the one to producing such content, wrote a blog on the amazing lessons she learned on what was, judging by her composure or lack thereof, her very first encounter with horses outside of Game of Thrones.
Turns out that we were not the only ones taking notes. The Hardy Stud manager got wind that another visiting group almost got lost looking for the facility. In what was fast becoming a worrying trend, they almost gave up on visiting Hardy Stud altogether save a last-gasp discovery of the route. For that reason, he disclosed, he needed a modern website with clear directions to go with details of the services he offered and a blog to boot. You should have seen how our software developers jumped at the chance.
A Screenshot of Hardy Stud Homepage built by Legibra.
A couple of weeks later, Hardy had an online stud, comfortably one of our most beautiful websites. They didn’t have to look far for the stunning images on the Homepage. Our cameraman had taken some cool ones and we were happy to use them. After thoroughly studying the target audience of the website (a standard we have set for ourselves), we realized they needed a Calendar which would display Upcoming Events for early preparation of prospects, and Bookings to avoid inconveniencing visitors. A gallery was added as well to whet the appetite of curious prospects; completing the list of extra functionalities we added from the goodness of our hearts.
The handover of the website was sweet and emotional as it brought down the curtain on yet another project we had quite a strong attachment to. It wasn’t to be a goodbye, however, as we sponsored the Horse Society of Kenya’s championship at Jamhuri Park just to take our team on another ride with our new friends.
While there, we had so much fun reuniting with the horses from Hardy Stud and the team from there. They told us the website had dramatically increased their visitors and credibility as one of the leading horse facilities in the country.
Disappointing Ending
As much as we love the beautiful animals, they are so busy jumping around that they don’t have time to reply to our emails. It is for that reason that we are looking for actual human beings to share our love and passion with this time around. Will you be the lucky one? Talk to us on [email protected].
Hugs.