Our Work

Services Provided

Oak Bay Softrends, a team of FileMaker developers and strategists from Vancouver, BC, with over 30 years of experience, creating custom solutions for their clients. Hop Studios has worked with Oak Bay Softrends for nearly two decades, collaborating on copywriting, analytics, marketing, and ExpressionEngine upgrades (just to name a few).

Hop Studios always enjoys partnering with companies that share our values and approach, and Oak Bay Softrends has been a fantastic long-term client. Since 2006, we’ve teamed up on a wide variety of projects to help support and enhance their digital presence.

In 2024, we upgraded Oak Bay Softrends’ website to the latest version of ExpressionEngine (EE7) — our second major CMS upgrade with them. The first was back in 2021 when we helped move their site from EE2 to EE6. With the 2024 upgrade, we also bumped their PHP from version 7 to 8 and refreshed several key add-ons, including Freeform, Detour Pro, SEEO and some of our own add-ons—Hop Edit This, Hop Minifizer, and Hop Deploy Helper. Each time we perform a CMS upgrade, we remove unnecessary and outdated add-ons and features to help improve site performance and make things easier to manage. The move to EE7 gave the backend a cleaner look and helped boost overall speed and security.

Oak Bay was running into a flood of spam submissions through their contact form—annoying and time-consuming to deal with. To fix that, we added reCAPTCHA, which instantly stopped the spam cold! No more junk messages to wade through!

We also took care of a few other updates that, while small, make a real impact. We improved their 404 page to help guide lost vistiors back to useful content, which can reduce bounce rates and support SEO. And we created a proper privacy policy, often overlooked but super important for transparency and compliance by clearly outlining business policies on data collection, storage, and usage.

Over the years, Hop Studios has worked closely with Oak Bay Softrends on content and marketing as well. We’ve written success stories based on interviews with their clients, created team bios for new hires and offered support with their Google Ads strategy to help achieve better results.

We also set up Google Analytics on their site and provided guidance to their team to help analyze data to better understand their audience, measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, and identify opportunities to improve the visitor experience.

We value our continued partnership with the team at Oak Bay Softrends and look forward to further collaboration with them. We highly recommend checking them out if you’re looking for custom FileMaker solutions.