cox graae + spack architects website

cox graae + spack homepage

We recently launched a new site at The Jake Group for a cox graae + spack architects (www.cgsarchitects.com). CGS is an architectural firm just down the street from us in Georgetown, and we enjoyed putting together this nice and clean website design.

One of CGS’s priorities for this site was that it render well across devices, in particular on the iPad and iPhone. CGS uses the iPad when presenting examples of their work to current and prospective clients, and therefore they needed to have confidence that their online portfolio would render consistently. Also, they required great precision regarding the layout of the site, meaning that elements could not shift or stretch at all between devices or browsers. The combination of these two requirements made for a challenging project, because inter-device compatibility is often achieved using styles that are shift depending on the viewing environment. However, we were able to meet the challenge and launch a site that achieves both ends.

The CGS project portfolio is the focus of the website with the two major components being the featured project animation on the homepage, and the portfolio itself. The homepage element is achieved using jQuery and required a fair bit of work to make sure that the overlapping images animated consistently. The site itself is built using WordPress, with the Portfolio section a pretty complex implementation of custom post types. Not only does the interface need to handle a number of variables that affect the display of project information, but the admin panel needs to be simple and intuitive because CGS will be managing the projects themselves. To help with the latter, we used field descriptions in addition to field names to help prompt the admin for the correct type of data (i.e., image sizes, video embed codes, etc.). The Jake Group is always looking for ways to improve the utility of WordPress as a CMS, and we feel that we made some progress on this site.

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