Target Audience
Reyes Construction is website for a construction company based out of the Inland Empire that deals primarily with government and state contracts. The website is targeted towards potential clients that would like to find more information about the company online before making their decision.
Objective or Challenge
I worked on this website as the developer with 2 other people. The website needed to incorporate a content management system that was easy to use and update information. The home page had a flash asset that displayed information about a few projects the company had worked on, and it had sliding panels to hide and display the information about the project you hovered over with the mouse. This asset needed to be recreated and be able to be updated. Also a gallery section needed to be created to showcase the company’s projects and be updateable via the CMS. The Silverstripe CMS the client wanted to use, wasn’t so easy to integrate additional functionality to.
Solution
Utilizing some creativity, I created additional tabs in the Silverstripe CMS so the client could update the home page slideshow and gallery section from the same area. I created a custom CMS using PHP and MYSQL that I integrated with the Silverstripe backend.
For the home page slideshow, I decided to build it using Javascript and jQuery because a similar look could be achieved this way and it makes it much easier for search engines to index the information. Also the slideshow need to be updateable, so javascript allowed for a smoother integration with PHP to pull the information from the database, as opposed to flash. The slideshow’s images, titles, thumbnails, and order of the projects can be updated via the CMS.
For the gallery section, I was given a design of how it was supposed to look and a brief description of how it was supposed to work. I took some careful planning before I could even start coding it. The site required a complex function that I needed to created to display the projects. I used PHP to pull the information from the database and javascript plus jQuery to provide the animated transitions between projects.