Navigant Consulting
Meet the new NavigantConsulting.com, a truly beautiful website both on the inside and out. Ivan Kandi did most of the design work, and I did most of the development. It has completely consumed my time since the beginning of the year, sparing me only two days off up until Friday, March 7. But it was all worth it in the end; I have never been more proud of my work, and I even won a “Core Award” for my efforts.
The original plan was to build the site in Microsoft SharePoint, per client request. Design Reactor has no SharePoint experience, so we hired a consultant to lead development. I was on-board to oversee his work and help out with the CSS. But once Navigant got a glimpse of the hosting costs, they decided to let us use ExpressionEngine instead. (SharePoint is meant to be a corporate intranet tool, and was clearly not created with public-facing websites in mind.) At that point, I became the main developer on the project, tasked with all back-end and just about all front-end development. (The only thing I wasn’t involved in on the front-end was the Knowledge Center, a one-stop shop for informative PDFs, upcoming events, testimonials, etc.)
Two drop-down menu styles used in the site’s header
To my knowledge, this is the first major project that has gone through Design Reactor where the bulk of the work centered around good old-fashioned HTML, rather than Flash – a welcome change. Flash does play a role, though. For instance, many pages contain relevant PDF downloads, and if the user has Flash Player installed, they will have the option to add these PDFs to their “Virtual Briefcase”. When the user is ready, they can download the entire contents of their Virtual Briefcase as a single Zip file.
Another fun use of Flash can be found in the Locations page which contains an interactive map, much like the one I did for Basic Chemical Solutions a couple years back.
Downloadable files and the Virtual Briefcase
As a whole, this was a very fun and educational project for me. It gave me the opportunity to learn ExpressionEngine, presented some interesting CSS challenges, and acquainted me with the crazy world of localization. And most importantly, the client was very pleased with the outcome. It’s not feature-complete quite yet – a new section, new languages, and other features are on their way. Stay tuned!
- Visit Navigant Consulting
