Codepal

Archive for March, 2011

Clarion

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Clarion Consultancy Services are pioneers in offering consultation, and active solutions from corporate research to close protection with support to governments, large multinational corporations and individuals. They wanted a website which could provide these services and training online and allow users to register and pay for the tutorials. Buck Design Ltd. did a great job in designing a user friendly, modern design and now it was our job to deliver an efficient CMS for content and user management.

The Challenge

The main challenge in this website was to implement a hierarchical membership system with three levels of members. Allowing users to register on their own, pay for the membership fee and access premium tutorials. Also to differentiate the kind of content the users can access based on their membership level.

We also had to implement a dashboard where the member can update his profile or upgrade to a higher level of membership. Other important stuffs included proper management of pages, contact forms, Google map integration etc.

The Solution

Our choice for content management system was WordPress. Also the fact that WordPress’ user management system is very efficient, it was our primary choice. Proper management of pages and content was easily implemented. WordPress was highly customized to implement the hierarchical architecture for user membership, facilitate the payment system for membership registration and proper accessibility of content based on the membership level.

Tags: CMS, Development, Membership System, PSD to Wordpress, Wordpress
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Structure Sealant C. Ltd.

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

Structural Sealant Contracts Ltd. are specialist sealant applicators based in London. The company is somewhat related to the Formworks Construction Company. We recently upgraded the Formwork site by implementing a customized WordPress content management solution. As being related to the Formwork Company, they got the chance to experience the internal workings of the website. They were really impressed by it and approached Buck Design Ltd. to re-design their website and we were given the responsibility to implement the content management solution. Along with the CMS implementation, we also provided some advanced features like recruitment system, Google map integration etc.

The Challenge

The site was pretty similar to the Formwork Company site as the two companies are related. But still there were many changes to the site with respect to the design. Even though the site was similar to the Formwork site, it was our job to give it a fresh appeal, user interaction wise.

CMS needed to be very efficient in managing the content and specially the images. There were a lot of images on every page and our task was to make everything dynamic such that the client could even change the images from the backend of the website. The homepage of the side needed a carousel of the featured posts and the featured news integrated as one continuous stream.

Similar to the Formwork site, we had to implement proper custom designed scroll bars as all the pages were of static height. It was necessary such that the content would not be restricted and the design won’t be ruined because of the default scroll bars.

The portfolio page was similar to the Formwork site in the way that the client could upload any number of project images. But it was still different because the project images were of a larger size and occupied most of the area of the page. Hence, it was really important to manage the images in such a way that it does not affect the loading time of the page and give a blank page feel.

Again, similar to the Formwork Site, the news and recruitment pages needed simple methods for posting new entries. The recruitment page required a special recruitment form which was to be linked with the respective recruitment posting. The contact page required a simple contact form and Google Map integration, displaying the location of the office.

The Solution

WordPress was again used as the CMS for the site. WordPress' immense flexibility and features like custom posts and custom taxonomies made the content management very efficient and user friendly. It also made our work easy in implementing the multi type carousel at the homepage.

CSS3 and jQuery were used a lot throughout the site to give its user interactivity a modern feel keeping it simple and user friendly. The scrollbars blended perfectly with the design and helped overcome the content restriction due to static height problem.

The project images were optimized and the customized backend uploading mechanism made the task of uploading heaps of images very easy. They were implemented using a slideshow approach such that one image is displayed at a time. This enabled all the other images to load on time and not destroy the design flow of the site.

Implementing the contact form was easy where as the recruitment form was a bit tricky as we had to link the form to the respective recruitment posting. The Google Map integration was also smooth because of the awesome API provided by Google.

Tags: CMS, CSS 3, Custom Posts, Development, PSD to Wordpress, Wordpress
Posted in Portfolio | No Comments »