Home page face lift for NELLCO
Of course, not all sites are suited to an evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) face lift. Putting lipstick on that 10 year old site with the scrolling marquee, blocky graphics, and green background is probably not a smart investment. But there are many websites with reasonable aesthetics - maybe a few years old - that don’t need to be torn down and rebuilt. Some creative thinking about how existing structural elements can be refined, coupled with a face lift of the home page’s content and, perhaps, key landing pages, can offer real bang for the buck.
Recently, we did just that for the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO).
“Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship” blog featured on WordPress Showcase
We think this implementation’s most interesting features are under the hood. The blog needed to be integrated with BCCCC’s primary content management system - CitySoft CE. We developed a WordPress template that automatically pulls and caches the top navigation (drop downs and all) from its CitySoft counterpart.
On the CitySoft side, we developed a home page template that pulls the recent items (the Director’s Blog, and general news) from WordPress. The CitySoft template loads a cached version of the entire home page that refreshes ever hour, resulting in a “zippy” home page despite the number of complex elements, not to mention the site’s traffic. Most visitors never know they are switching between two completely different systems!