EMB Umbraco Website Integration

This project commenced by carrying out design workshops onsite at EMB to understand the current problems involved with having two websites and what the client wanted to improve. The design workshops also involved the redesign process of two new logos for EMB Group and EMB Excellence. After the initial workshops, multiple workshops were held to involve the client in the final designs. Once these were approved PSP started work on the requirements and specification.

Within the specification for phase one of the new EMB Group and EMB-X website it included the required page types, fields and designs including responsive design.

To create and design a user friendly website a clean design was preferred. This was achieved by using contrasting colours (from their logo and some bolder colours), white space and visual cues to draw the visitors attention. The focus for this design was to not overload the visitors with content, therefore we adopted a clear design. This allowed the client to communicate all of their key information in a visually led way.

By using responsive design this allowed us to have control over different page layouts based on the size of the device it was being viewed on. Included in the responsive design was to make the images responsive too.

To upload and publish content we utilised the users section in Umbraco (open source CMS). We defined three user levels which each had their own levels of permission. This allows the client to internally control who can add users and have full administrative access to users who have access to upload content only.

We created listing pages to allow the users to display their content and provided options to choose how many items they show on a page, where the data is pulled from (child pages, pages from this site and pages across both sites) and what type of item to show (Active/Archived). We also added functionality for the data to be filtered by a from date, to date, service and by the type of page.

To give EMB as much functionality and intuitive navigation as we could, we created dynamic menus which pull through child pages and related pages. There were options to add links manually which would take precedence over any pages which were pulled through dynamically. We also included the option to hide or show items (including top menu, side menu or hiding an item from the site map,) by multiple checkboxes in the Umbraco CMS.

We created promotional boxes on page to allow EMB to offer more content in a clear design. These boxes can be populated with an image, text and links and act as fast navigation for the visitor. In the CMS full access was provided to manage the appearance and functionality of these boxes including changing the header text, background colour of the header, or whether it showed an image and or additional links.