Emco is named derived from the words 'Electrical Mechanical Company' and as such they are an all around Electrical-Mechanical Service Contractor aiming at the Gulf Market with Bahrain as a prime target. Emco specialises in the field of Electrical, Electronic, Refrigeration, Air Conditioning, Plumbing, Drainage, Fire Fighting and Maintenance work.

In 2008 I was asked to be involved in the construction of their new Content Management driven website.

When I looked at the website brief for the Emco website I realised that they were asking a little bit more from their Content Management System (CMS).



Gallery

The first interesting thing was they wanted to use the fantastic artist impressions of the projects they have been involved in. A great idea, these illustrations add rich colour to the web pages in contrast the corporate and sophisticated look and feel of the site. The results are spectacular for this type of website, all credit to our partners in this project, FriendsOfOurs, their confident art direction speaks for itself here. The interface built by myself and one junior developer allows Emco staff to upload 'Artist Impressions', 'Project Images' or 'Video Walkthroughs' to one Flash based gallery space.



Based on the files available for each project the CMS provides the correct gallery links to the user. These gallery links interact with the gallery seamlessly to allow someone browsing the site to navigate between the different visual spaces, while remaining on the same website project page.

Graceful Navigation

Another challenge we are proud to have met is the menu on the 'Projects' and 'News & Press' sections. As these parts of the site contain many items a mechanism for filtering is required. For example on the projects page you can filter by :

  • Featured Projects
  • Name
  • Date
  • Building Type

As you do so the menu for the projects section re-orders itself, with the appropriate headings, without reloading the page that you are on. This promotes a much more streamlined and graceful experience for site visitors.

When arriving on pages with a long secondary menu this menu is divided into secions. The menu automatically reveals the correct page and maintains the ordering already selected. These types of features are often missed by end users, and in fact this is often the point, but there is a reasonable amount of AJAX wizardry going on to get these types of things to "just work" as people expect.