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Five Jars is an international Web Development, Web Design, and Strategy company led by leaders with 10+ years of experience in web development. In the last 6 years, we’ve delivered 100+ projects for clients in health & fitness, media, art & culture, and NGO markets, including 10+ mid-to-enterprise clients such as George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Council for Exceptional Children, Fortune 500 organizations, and numerous large YMCAs across the US.
Read MoreFive Jars is an international Web Development agency that helps mid to enterprise companies create intuitive, data-driven web experiences. In the last 6 years, we’ve delivered 100+ projects for clients in fitness, education, commercial and NGO markets, including 10+ mid-to-enterprise clients such as Mount Vernon Museum, Council for Exceptional Children, and numerous large YMCAs across the US.
Full-Service Software Development
Leaders with 10+ year of experience in Web Development
If you want to create next-level digital products that delight users, we’re the right choice for your software development partner.
Customer-oriented mindset
Hire a software development company that knows your market and will develop solutions that help you achieve your business goals.
Transparent development processes
When working with us, you know exactly where your money goes. We organize our work using Agile & Scrum and provide regular customer status calls.
Head office
Previously, I worked for a non-profit organization that commissioned development from the Five Jars, so I knew about them first-hand. The guys listened to all my wishes and always supported me if I asked for a new feature. It was really comfortable to work with them!
It's really hard for me to say something when it comes to improvement zones. It was a very comfortable experience, so I have nothing to say.
I definitely recommend Five Jars as one of the best software development companies.
The team provided us with an initial estimate of the development and milestones based on that. During it, Five Jars never missed deadlines and was always in touch, using Slack as the main communication channel. We tracked all the technical phases of the project in Basecamp. Five Jars is a team of professionals with many years of experience. They don't go into a long learning phase but quickly move into development with a sufficient number of experienced developers. We appreciate the speed of implementing solutions, so this team turned out to be a godsend for us.
At the beginning of the project, the difficulty was their early working hours, since they were based in Ukraine. However, after the relocation of the developers, we chose a convenient working time for us.
Five Jars is a professional team that I recommend and would like to continue our cooperation in the future.
I found Five Jars in the Clutch ratings and decided to pick them for their price per hour and an office in LA where I can go if I want to. I stick to an informal style of communication even at work and the guys from Five Jars got involved in it without any problems. The guys from Five Jars really understood the specifics of the music industry and they were always open to my suggestions.
I have nothing to say about this. It was an incredible experience interacting with the development team.
It was an incredible experience interacting with the development team! I recommend them as excellent creative project performers.
I knew about the Five Jars team from my friends working on large non-profit projects. After reviewing their portfolio and awards, I decided to go with them. I prefer a more formal style of communication, especially since I have to present the results of our collaboration with the Five Jars at the board meeting weekly, so I immediately warned the team that we would be conducting official correspondence via e-mail. My project manager on the Five Jars side had no problem with this. I appreciated their experience and rational approach to evaluating their work: they did not promise anything that they could not deliver. It was a productive partnership.
No improvement is needed. A solid top-notch company.
I think Five Jars is a great agency, so I recommend them as developers.
Five Jars were chosen due to the fact that they have implemented similar cases for businesses from other industries. We also found them in several ratings on the Clutch. We have weekly updates from the project manager but in addition to that, there are regular communications when we or they need it. The team has an impressive combination of technical skills, business intelligence, and excellent communication.
I definitely have nothing to say about this. I was initially concerned that there may be language barrier issues but their English is excellent and communication generally is great.
Yes, I recommend the Five Jars company.
I chose Five Jars because of its price tag, attractive social media, and office close to my home. Communication with the team was easy and productive. Our project manager always responded quickly to my emergency requests in messengers. Five Jars easily integrate their team into any idea, startup or company. They are open to ideas and willing to innovate themselves. They are also really at the forefront of technological innovation!
I can't assume anything, it seems to me that the company organized its work perfectly.
I recommend the agency as an excellent service provider.
The Five Jars team are real partners, not performers. They dive into the project deep, suggest ideas and implement them. The designer of the team created a modern and attractive design based on our wishes. We could control the development progress in Jira and use Adobe XD for the design.
Working with them was an amazing experience so I have nothing to say.
I recommend them as developers.
I'm satisfied with the MVP we've done with the Five Jars team. I am currently looking for an investor for this project. I love working with professionals when I don't have to dive into a whole area that I don't know. Working with the Five Jars was a real partnership where the other side fulfilled their obligations without my constant checks. We had Skype calls several times, but most of the time I prefer text messages.
I think the team needs to expand the development staff because sometimes the implementation of a feature was delayed due to other projects.
Yes, I recommend Five Jars and remain a customer myself.
The Five Jars development team rebuilt the site from scratch, implementing all the features I needed and increasing the speed of the entire fitness system. They are ready to explain any development detail and do not try to use highly specialized terms. In other words, the communication was amazing. We used a lot of internal tracking tools like Slack, so I always knew what was happening on the project.
I don't think they need to change anything - I'm happy with my collaboration with Five Jars.
Yes, I recommend them.
There are some really big players in the eLearning market in the Five Jars portfolio, so I trusted their development experience. Our Five Jars team provides a comfortable learning process by redesigning and making an intuitive layout with an adjusted whiteboard and responsive instruments enhancing such basic operations as undo, redo, zooming, selecting, moving objects, and others. Their communication and work experience is impressive.
I had my doubts about their hourly price, but it was worth it!
Five Jars is very easy to work with! Recommend!
We communicated on Skype and chatted in Slack, also Trello and Jira were used to track progress. I can easily interact with the team, since we have no problems with the language barrier and the guys are always ready to listen to my requests. The team is not afraid to take on difficult tasks, since many years of experience are on their side.
I have nothing to say about this. This is a real partnership when the development team becomes part of the business.
We continue to actively work with Five Jars - the guys have a huge number of ideas on how to improve all processes of our production. I definitely recommend this agency as a web development provider.
I was afraid my lack of technical background would make it hard for me to follow project progress but PM was brilliant. I knew what was happening at every step of the way. We had regular weekly calls with the project manager on Zoom, and the main communication was via email or Slack.
Our partnership with Five Jars has been so productive that I have absolutely nothing to recommend to them.
Yes, I recommend them as a great agency.
I am the founder of the flower company. I wanted to implement an online sale and delivery of flowers from my flower store. Before the pandemic, we were not represented online, but now it has become a convenient way to do business. I needed a development team that would be able to create a workable product in a short time so that we would be presented online as soon as possible. Ultimately, the Five Jars team built our online store even faster than we expected. All team members were responsive and enthusiastic. It was a pleasure working with Five Jars. I was in touch with our project manager in Slack daily, and we also used Jira to track progress.
I don't think there's anything they can improve on — working with them has been a satisfying experience.
I really recommend this team.
Spooky Nook Sports recently transitioned to a new CRM system and identified various areas for improvement. Especially the UX design and the user journeys required an update to align with the overall desired website experience. Five Jars was hired to analyze the current state, identify areas for improvement and, eventually, integrate the required third-party functionalities.
Spooky Nook Sports operates the largest indoor sports complex in the United States and offers numerous different sports. Besides offering sports fields, Spooky Nook Sports offers a hotel, gym, and other recreational services such as an arcade, food court and meeting space. During their recent transition to the ACTIVENet CRM, Spooky Nook Sports recognized several areas for development regarding online scheduling and online calendar presentation. Identifying yet untapped efficiency-increasing opportunities, Spooky Nook Sports approached Five Jars to analyze their new CRM and integrate third-party functionalities to offer a seamless and intuitive UX to users while streamlining business processes.
We have launched a calendar and schedules widgets on the website that are constantly syncing with the ACTIVENet CRM and display up-to-date information about all available events. In order to achieve a seamless and intuitive solution, we analyzed the current state of the CRM transition and anticipated the near-future changes to the data structure. We ultimately went live in a phased way to ensure a smooth roll-out of our solution.
George Washington’s Mount Vernon has been increasing its video production efforts to offer additional value to its visitors and members. Besides pre-recorded videos, Mount Vernon now offers live events and other captivating online experiences as well as a membership area with additional members-only content. However, their video content management system reached its peak of usability and they turned to Five Jars as their long-term development partner to re-design the way content is managed and presented to visitors and members.
Through the initial discovery phase, our developers created a detailed backlog and kicked off with a structured time and budget plan.
The final solution not only reduced the time needed to manage the video portal by over 200 hours per year but also updated the UI/UX of the video portal to a more sophisticated online web platform worthy of Mount Vernon.
Several YMCAs searched collectively for a platform solution to host their video content and draw more traffic to their online offerings. They selected Five Jars to deliver three standalone websites and cater for individual requests while acknowledging a tight budget.
The YMCAs approached Five Jars to create a website presenting their video content in an engaging and captivating way in order to foster their online presence. All YMCAs are non-profit organizations and as such have only a limited budget available. To leverage their means, a group of several YMCAs approached us with a nearly identical request. This allowed us to deliver a comprehensive, future-proof video content website. To facilitate seamless integration into the existing environment, we have built our solutions on Open Y and integrated the Virtual Y functionality.
Five Jars upholds user-centricity as one of the cornerstones of successful online solutions. Therefore, we have implemented a single sign-on solution based on Daxko, ActiveNet, Personify and TractionRec. This streamlines the users’ access to the platform as well as all the other user-only content of the YMCAs with only one sign-on only. This creates an outstanding user experience.
The Virginia Alliance of YMCAs unites 27 independent Ys that serve communities throughout the Commonwealth. The Virginia Alliance brings Virginia Ys together to improve YMCAs' capacity and effectiveness to serve their members and communities through programs and key initiatives at a statewide level.
The Virginia Alliance of YMCAs was functioning on a website that not only looked dated, but was missing some basic functionality, and was challenging to maintain, frequently bumping into errors when making security updates in WordPress without developer support. It was critical to allow the Alliance to apply security updates, keep content up to date, and take advantage of the fast-growing Open Y movement.
Five Jars was able to work with the Alliance to build a new website based on the Open Y platform providing a more stable and secure solution for content management, with easier updates and maintenance, including mobile optimization through leveraging the features built into Open Y. We used Open Y out of the box, but we also developed "Find your YMCA" leveraging "Locations" basic function from Open Y.
A microsite was implemented to disseminate the service offering while retaining the wider design context of the website. To foster user-friendliness, a search function specifically for this microsite has been added to let parents search for the information they need easily.
YMCA of the North desired to introduce a microsite communicating their daycare and preschool programs for various age groups to their community and beyond. While forming a part of the wider YMCA of the North website, the Early Childhood Learning Centers (ECLC) microsite should provide a very distinct browsing feeling to the user. Five Jars created a microsite with parallels to the YMCA of the North websites, but which is still offering a completely new user experience. Eventually, we populated the microsite together with the ECLC team and the Creative Director of YMCA of the North to deliver an astonishing result.
The ECLC offers childcare services by fulfilling the highest child care standards. Talking with the ECLC team, Five Jars received their design concept as well as their vision of the final website. The result is a website full of colors, different shapes, lines, and pictures. In contrast to the wider YMCA of the North websites, the ECLC microsite is bursting with color and, therefore, with perceived happiness. With our distinct design, we gave the ECLC a microsite truly representing their values of openness, youthfulness, and trustworthiness.
The Channel Islands YMCA was started in 1887 in Santa Barbara and Ventura. The Channel Islands YMCA has grown to include six health and fitness facilities across two counties (spanning from Lompoc to Camarillo), a Youth and Family Services branch with four independent programs, and more than 20 child care locations.
Through its growth, Channel Islands YMCA had maintained eight replicated WordPress websites. The main goal was to consolidate all websites to one primary site with branch landing pages and create one-off pages from each landing page, leading to simplified website navigation and an enhanced content management experience.
We created a digital concept and user journeys in a sitemap. This conceptual sitemap visually maps all the potential entities, user flows, content types, and interactions on a website. Whereas a traditional "sitemap" typically works to create an overview of a given site's information architecture. This process ensured that our initial focus was on the overall user experience that we are building. We also focused on building a website compliant with the YMCA of the USA brand guidelines and Section 508. We made sure that the site is fully responsive during the development, in all resolutions, and functional on all modern browsers. Also mobile responsive for phones and tablets with all the critical functions on the desktop, scaled appropriately so that it is viewable on all mobile phones and tablets.
YMCA members are increasingly relying on mobile devices, voice assistants, and new channels of content delivery. YMCA associations need to stay ahead of the curve to ensure that they meet the needs of their members.
Voice assistants will continue to have more massive total user bases on in homes, smartphones, and cars. Smart speaker owners are employing a wider variety of voice use cases and showing a higher frequency of use than the other devices. It means that voice assistants in smart speakers are more likely to have become a daily habit and are expanding consumer expectations around voice interactive experiences.
Five Jars created an Amazon Alexa skill that allows users to interact with YMCA content through conversational, natural language, and shows off a variety of new features. The Amazon Alexa skill for YMCA uses the Open Y website as a source of data via REST API. The Program Event Framework provides all the needed details about the schedules and program registration.
The project brief was bursting with innovation opportunities. YMCA of the North desired to innovate the way they inform visitors about upcoming events as well as how to guide them through their buildings. Five Jars accepted the challenge to digitalize the offline processes and create an engaging, new way of taking care of guests.
The reason why the YMCA sought a digital signage solution was simple – visitor experience. YMCA buildings are often big and many events take place simultaneously. This meant that staff was required to bring lost visitors on the right path. Besides causing higher overhead for the YMCAs, the hard-to-navigate buildings caused a negative visitor experience right at the beginning of their visit.
Digital Signage has emerged just recently and its full potential is yet to be elaborated upon. YMCA of the North recognized the potential of these screens and asked us to create a pilot project not only for this YMCA but, if successful, for all YMCAs out there. Five Jars embarked on a discovery journey to evaluate the available software and hardware solutions as well as their compatibility with the YMCA environment. It was not only for YMCA of the North the first digital signage project but for us as well. How exciting! Moreover, Five Jars was the first developer to combine Open Y and digital signage solutions - ever.
The YMCA of Greater Seattle fosters healthy living habits, and a strong sense of community in the Greater Seattle region through its 14 branches. The goal of the YMCA of Greater Seattle is to provide an excellent customer experience to all members and prospective members that visit its website, seattleymca.org.
The YMCA of Greater Seattle (YGS) was one of the original Ys to support and adopt Open Y to manage its online presence. After initial adoption, however, YGS did not stay current with Open Y releases, and, after nearly two years, YGS deviated significantly from the Open Y project. This created a number of problems and inefficiencies for YGS that prevented it from taking advantage of the latest Open Y features. This is when Five Jars stepped in to bring YGS up-to-date with the Open Y project. YGS demanded advanced Open Y features, a streamlined content editing experience, and more affordable and manageable Open Y upgrades going forward, to avoid falling behind again.
Once we made schedules more accessible, Five Jars focused on improving the site search experience as a way to increase customer engagement. Five Jars implemented Google Custom Search to take advantage of Google’s technology and customer brand trust, rather than tinkering with an alternate custom solution. Google Custom Search lives at seattleymca.org and returns relevant content based on Google ranking. It also provides options to filter results by specific website sections like jobs, blogs, or filter results out and display only PDF files. YMCA of Greater Seattle contributed this as a module to the Open Y platform as a part of a significant release.
Simple, powerful, and innovative Open Y website that makes members happy.
YMCA of Greater Brandywine is an association of eight YMCAs with more than 80,000 members across Chester County. The association offers life-changing programs for children, families, and adults in Chester County, Pennsylvania. YMCA of Greater Brandywine, like any other non-profit, has lofty goals but also has both limited financial and staff resources.
We worked with the YMCA to digitally transform their membership experience. Starting with a migration to the Open Y platform, we quickly followed with improved Group Exercise schedules, a streamlined program registration process, a digital signage launch with promotional and schedules screens, all while lowering expenses for future Open Y upgrades and digital signage software.
Five Jars automated the video converting and reduced the time spent on these administrative tasks.
YMCA of the North is responsible for the preparation and uploading of dozens of videos – each day. While this is great as a lot of amazing content is being produced, it also shifts the bottleneck from content creation to video preparation. Five Jars was hired to automate the video preparation and reduce the time spent on these administrative tasks.
By closely collaborating with YMCA of the North, our developers were able to capture the entire functionality of the final solution and create a sophisticated tool that reduced the required time from 45 minutes to just shy under 5 minutes. In other terms, YMCA of the North was able to reduce the required labor time per video by 88.9% - that’s magnificent, isn’t it?
The Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) is the largest professional association of educators focused on advancing the success of children with exceptionalities founded in 1922. CEC is the leading place for community and resources in special education and is well known as a source for information, resources, and professional development for special educators.
Full web presence redesign for a major educational association (Council for Exceptional Children), a professional association of educators focused on advancing the success of children with exceptionalities.
Five Jars went through the full cycle redesign with the CEC team to digitally transform their web presence and improve brand consistency across all platforms. We created a digital ecosystem for the CEC to host 70+ microsites and created an engaging, positive website visitor experience.
YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties set off to strengthen its communities and connect its people through activities and events. They create opportunities for people to thrive in an inclusive, open environment. Five Jars was hired to help them achieve this mission online – through an overhaul of their website and by integrating sophisticated, new functions.
YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties has been an eager Open Y community member. However, without having done any major update to their old website, their technology environment became outdated and error-prone. Five Jars was hired to update their entire website in order to enable the running of all the necessary functionality. By updating its entire web presence, Five Jars introduced a user-centric approach to creating seamless user journeys.
Five Jars migrated and overhauled an existing website to harness the power of sophisticated functionalities such as single sign-on and data analytics. One of the overarching goals, however, was to foster efficient updating in the future. Therefore, our developers created synergies wherever possible and created an intuitive user interface as well as a backend to simplify all processes.
George Washington’s Mount Vernon has been increasing its video production efforts to offer additional value to its visitors and members. Besides pre-recorded videos, Mount Vernon now offers live events and other captivating online experiences as well as a membership area with additional members-only content. However, their video content management system reached its peak of usability and they turned to Five Jars as their long-term development partner to re-design the way content is managed and presented to visitors and members.
George Washington’s Mount Vernon has been increasing its video production efforts to offer additional value to its visitors and members. Besides pre-recorded videos, Mount Vernon now offers live events and other captivating online experiences as well as a membership area with additional members-only content. However, their video content management system reached its peak of usability and they turned to Five Jars as their long-term development partner to re-design the way content is managed and presented to visitors and members.
Through the initial discovery phase, our developers created a detailed backlog and kicked off with a structured time and budget plan. The final solution not only reduced the time needed to manage the video portal by over 200 hours per year but also updated the UI/UX of the video portal to a more sophisticated online web platform worthy of Mount Vernon.
George Washington’s Mount Vernon is the most popular historic estate in the United States with more than 85 million people having visited the estate since 1860. Five Jars has been collaborating with Mount Vernon since 2018 and is responsible for the digital advancement of the web environment. Together with our client, we create a user experience which blends into the excitement of visiting the landmark later in the user journey.
George Washington’s Mount Vernon partnered with Five Jars to help with difficult technological challenges, to update and advance their web environment and add additional features to their ticketing platform and website.
As Five Jars is experienced in working together with non-profit organisations and the Tessitura ecosystem, we were the right choice to team up with and started straight away by analysing the web environment. We help Mount Vernon constantly innovate what they do online.
A large website improvement project which required an extraordinarily diverse team to tackle all challenges successfully.
YMCA of the North attracts 3,000,000+ unique users annually. With that amount of traffic, every single website improvement becomes a complex project. In order to delight customers, increase impact and grow their organization, YMCA of the North hired Five Jars to carry out necessary development work as well as improve the user experience across its online presence.
Five Jars evaluated the required steps and kicked the project off with a diverse project team. Integrations we built generate demand and revenue for YMCA products and services. Our solutions process tons of data and allow people to book and register for programs, training, and camps online. In addition, processes we automated save time and money and show high ROI. By simplifying the scholarship application process, we made it easy for many families to join the Y.