The Challenge

iSolar required three websites: Bright Future Portal, Bright Future, and iSolar. The three arms are the three main web presences: Bright Future Portal, which houses content for schools, monitoring data, and more; and Bright Future and iSolar which provide organisation-specific information.

Our Solution

Zack Design created a multi-site install of WordPress, and created custom code for the monitoring data, allowed schools to log in to the platform, and created all necessary code.

2009 – Present

http://suelawson.com.au/

http://mowercorner.com.au/

Mower Corner required a simple information site as a first point of contact for web visitors.

The Challenge

Because the marketing strategy for this client involves getting people interested enough to come and visit their shop front, the website needed to provide all the information they had in one hit.

Our Solution

It was decided to create a single-page layout. All the content on the site is editable, including the slideshows and text. Even the contact email form and supplier links are modal window popups.

http://bendix.com.au

Bendix is a hub for mechanics all over Australia looking for brakes to match to their cars. It is also Bendix’s main point of contact for marketing, and it serves New Zealand and Australia by showing its stockist locations.

The Challenge

Convert their existing website to a user-friendly, 21st century website with all of the convenience and power that current content management systems can provide. The website will not only be used for Australia and New Zealand, but in the future will have Bendix’s international branches added. The website needed to be accessible to mechanics with low-end computers but still provide a current-generation user-experience.

Not only that, but they had to have a further sub-section added to the website, the Performance section, with its own sets of sports-related stockists, catalogue search utilities, and theme.

Our Solution

Zack Design partnered with the marketing company responsible for Bendix and delivered a Drupal-based website with the many different sections, and on top of that included an administrative back-end allowing for site administrators to modify their catalogue easily. The website was created with the end-user experience in mind, and went through countless revisions before the final site was launched. Everyone who uses it finds it intuitive to use and lauds the user experience.

I’ve yet to complete the front page which will have a slideshow of what I offer, as well as some quick links straight to the forum (among other things).

I’m not supporting IE 6 on purpose. I have made sure it degrades OK, but I’m not worried if the site doesn’t look quite the same (it doesn’t). If Google and Microsoft don’t feel they want to support IE6 anymore I don’t see any reason why I should either.

Not only that, over the last month IE6 counts for a fraction of the visits to my site – 0.7%. In total, IE browsers only account for 11.8% of total visits. Out of the IE browsers visiting my site, only 6% are IE6. Due to these statistics, I believe it is now no longer viable for me to support IE6 and will gradually phase such support out across all my projects (except of course in those rare cases where it is still necessary).

So here we are, a slightly complex one page site heavily optimised with W3 Total Cache and running two carousels and a Flash slideshow.

As usual I load the contact page and their catalogue link via Colorbox, an extremely versatile and good-looking jQuery modal window plugin which gives that extra impressive layer of content delivery that users expect these days.

The website includes solar data monitoring, aggregation, and display. For PDFs I suggested my client use Issuu and Colorbox modal windows, which work extremely well together!

W3 Total Cache has been a massively useful tool which I’m installing on all large production sites these days. Using a combination of Firebug and the Google Page Speed plugin together with W3 Total Cache I’m able to dramatically increase the speed of page loads in WordPress. Just using the minification and CDN (or parallelisation options) that W3 Total Cache offers often increases a website’s Page Speed score by 10. Depending on its usefulness, I also implement page caching (though this can lead to problems with authentication so I’ve disabled it for Bright Future).

• Chaos Tool Suite
• Panels
• The new Admin module for Drupal which mimics Drupal 7
• Image module (With the advanced ImageMagick module)
• Views
• Nice Menus – this required a significant amount of fluffing around with the CSS – I just wish there was a good Suckerfish module!

We ended up using the most complicated panel layout and many, many different kinds of views to get the right feel for the front page. The Zen starterkit for Drupal is also a magnificent way to start off a theme, but I’ve often found that one of the biggest problems with Drupal theming is that you have to start with the Drupal ids and classes rather than your own otherwise there’s so much more work involved.

Still, I think you’ll agree that the end result is quite good!

New QuickShop with the following:

• Use of the shortcodes API that come with WordPress. This will unfortunately mean another change to the way things are laid out for those who already have shops. To make it easier on you guys I’ll release a version 1.3.12 to make it bug-free without forcing you to massively change the way you work. The new shortcodes version will be 1.4, so stay on 1.3.x if you don’t want things to break.
• Bugfixes galore! I’ve been following the forums, don’t worry!
• Anything else I can fit in. I’ve been planning a LOT, but not all of it will make it in.

New plugin updates for the CSS Drop-downs, and the multi-category search plugin. All coming down the pipes in the next month or two.