Creative Web Development

After a lot of hard work the new eBooks site for EBSCOhost has launched. About 8 months ago we began work on this new marketing site. This new initiative for the company had to make a bold statement and be rich in content and functionality. We wanted to showcase the breathe of the product we offer as well as what will differentiate us from competitors. The challenge we faced from a marketing perspective is that we are actually launching the marketing prior to the full development of the product so there were many shifts and tweaks along the way to account for product development.

That’s all well and good but what about the site you ask? Yes! The result is a portal type site – allowing consumers to choose between eBooks or Audiobooks – that is very rich in content and our offerings. Taking advantage of Expression Engine we were able to build out multiple channels to support all the content we wanted to incorporate. I utilized java-script to showcase our featured titles and metadata in sleek carousel with hover. The subject sets were built so that the users can quickly find pricing and titles in a given category. The Audiobooks section gives users samples to listen to. The site is built in HTML 5 so that as it grows and browsers start to incorporate more of the mark up in their updates the site can utilize all the new language’s features. Take a look and see for yourself!

Bridges Montessori School, a Bright Horizons School, set out to update their website with a new design and new functionality all built in an easy to maintain CMS. Sitefinity was chosen for this purpose. The design was given to a&g and I set out to bring the unique features they required to life. The most challenging part of building the site was getting the layout in the templates just right. Because the content is managed through the CMS the layout had to always be able to expand to all difference heights depending on the content – so the footer had to have a special function in order to always know it needs to sit below the body content.

Other unique features of this site that I used is the drop down navigation, the homepage slide-show (which is done in jquery), three different contact forms- including the one short one that is on every page. All of the forms are saved to the database and email out the information In addition, audio was needed for the school song. I used a unique jquery audio player for this. A few other items worth mentioning are the use of jquery for “Read More” information on some of the long pages as well as the use of Google maps and Google calendar for very easy maintenance of these important items!