Aquila Furniture
Aquila design and manufacture bespoke furniture for bars & restaurants, reception areas, offices & casinos. They specialise in high impact items influenced by the latest ideas in art and design. Their site has two main sections, the first of which is the portfolio where you can view examples of work. Organised by category, you can browse the preview images and view any that catch your eye:
Selected images appear in a lightbox style overlay. Viewers can also navigate through the image sequence while in this mode, with previous/next images pre-loading automatically to improve page response times:
Viewers can also control how many preview items appear on each page using the controls provided. Increasing or decreasing the preview count causes items to fade in/out as appropriate. The preview count selection is remembered when the viewer returns to the site:
The site is designed to work on as many browsers as possible. Tested browsers include Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Konqueror. Older or less capable browsers will simply miss out the more advanced features such as the lightbox style image display and preview count controls. There is also support for some handheld devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. Accessibility functions such as page text re-sizing and keyboard navigation are provided.
The other main section of the site is the catalogue which works in a similar way to the portfolio.
As usual, a full content management system has been provided to allow staff to run their website.
Garside Waddingham
A recent web development project was for Garside Waddingham, a residential and commercial estate agency based in the North West of England.
Public Website
The public website required a redesign to match the style of new brochures, leaflets and other promotional material. The website uses a third party property search system so this was customised as much as possible to help it fit in with the new design.
Website Admin System
Most of the development time was spent on the website admin system. This is a private system which allows the Garside Waddingham staff to manage the content of their new website.
Any changes to page content are immediately applied to the public website. Admin system users can update page titles, taglines, main content blocks, logos, background images and more. New pages can be created, and the display order of pages within a section can be changed through a simple drag-and-drop function.
Pages within the site can be linked to one another, or to external addresses. These links can be re-ordered, edited or removed at any time. A similar function allows staff to attach PDF documents to any page, making them available for download on the public site.
Staff can add news stories to the public website, setting publication and expiry dates to control how long they appear for. Images can also be added to each story.
Access to the admin system is controlled through user accounts. Each user can be given specific system rights, to limit which parts of the public website they can edit.
The admin system has been designed to work on any standards-based web browser.