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!

Last week we launched the Digital Archives website here at EBSCO Marketing. I had been working on this site for a while and am pretty excited about the result. This was my first site I built using the new HTML 5 mark up. HTML 5 is pretty amazing and while the browser support for all the functionality is not quite yet there, it makes sense to start to use the new tagging and java-script to get used to programming this way. The result for this site was awesome – the css was way simplier and I found that the cross browser coompatiablity was pretty high (a few IE 7 tweaks of course but whatcha going to do?).

The Archives site was also built entirely in Expression Engine. Some key features include the home page Carousel (which we should credit the Image Flow plug-in here), Contextual right side navigation (changes depending the page you are on), drop-down navigation, and Lightbox for the product samples. Using expression engine allows us to easily separate the content out from the design allowing our copywriters to tweak the copy on their own. The templating system in ee is great as you can code right within the CMS and have the template make decisions based on the content and what page you are on. Overall this site is a winner.

The Boys and Girls Club of Woburn were in desperate need of a new website. Their old website was over 10 years old and looked it. Myself and a small team at a&g were happy to take on this task, pro bono of course. The designer at a&g came up with a fun design that tied in with the club’s mission and I set on the task of bringing it to life.

I developed this site in WordPress to be able to give the club the ability to fill in the content and make updates by themseleves. Some highlights of developement include a calendar, the share this ability and the dynamic drop down navigation. The biggest challenge was the homepage image carousel and getting the quote bubbles to line up with the rotating carousel . I was able to use a highly customizable jquery plugin called jcarsouel that allowed me to write my own javascript to create the affects I needed. The Boys and Girls Club was thrilled with their new modern site and love that they have the ability to keep the content fresh in the months to come!