PewterKrew.com was a site redesign project driven by the content and the content management.
When PewterKrew came to O6, they were running their site off of a content management system that didn’t manage their content and provided a navigation system that didn’t work. Because of that, we approached the redesign with the specific intent to get as far away from those problems as we could.
We kept the design as clean as possible. A Flash header was provided, as were a set of drop-down navigational menus. We built a vertical navigation menu to allow no limit to the number of options it could hold (violating the “Rule of Seven” but giving the client exactly what they wanted). The space below the navigation was reserved for a user login, so that it wouldn’t take up space elsewhere. This left the vast majority of page space available for content.
The home page was broken out into content boxes, as requested by the client. These boxes are all controlled by tools on the administration side of the site.
The rest of the site was left without a content management system, meaning that Adobe Dreamweaver could be used, as preferred by the PewterKrew staff.
In the absence of a CMS, a navigation menu management system was developed so that links could be added to, removed from, and reordered within the site navigation menus.
The only content that remained database-driven was the news archive, for which a small management system was developed.
The entire site was built on top of the phpBB forum system, allowing one set of user accounts to function across both the main site and the site forums. This also means that only one login is required to jump between the site administration system and the forums.
The above text and images were copied directly from the portfolio of my former development company, O6 Web Services, as I imported it over to this blog. It was not updated for re-publishing. This project launched in June 2007.