Work for Workthing - Workthing-PeopleBank.com
Probably the largest project that I have ever worked on was the relaunch of the Workthing Limited corporate website, Workthing-PeopleBank.com, was a complete rebuild from the ground up.
I originally got involved with the project to redesign the folder structure for the site, and how the pages would be pulled together using Server Side Includes. My brief was simply to make the process as simple and efficient for us to maintain as possible, while keeping the existing page links where ever possible.
While I was working on the basics of the server structure, one of the other designers was tweaking the final design, and questions were being raised about the type of navigation to be used on the site. The problem was that while the content was generally categorised well, there was so much of it that a lot of it was often lost in the depths of the site.
What was required was a navigation system that allowed all of the relevant linked content to be available when viewing a page, but not to appear too bloated, as well as being as accessible as possible. A drop down menu system was considered, but dismissed on the grounds of some of the menus being too deep to be practical, plus there was no easy way to tell where abouts on the site you were based on the navigation.
In the end the only real solution was a tree based menu, with a JavaScript solution ruled out, the list had to appear static, but remain easy to maintain. To solve this I designed an SSI driven menu system that used unordered lists style by CSS. At the top of each page is a piece of configuration code, that tells the menu which branches to display, and what page to highlight as active.