Bank Website Design Project
I was hired as Content Manager for the Texas Trust Credit Union Project which later evolved into some design and development. The site was content heavy and required a great deal of strategy to effectively organize and display it on the website. I worked with a Lead Developer to perform development and custom content design such as the glossary of terms, page content, video and other media. We created custom classes that would generate styles automatically for the bank’s on-staff Content Editor once the project went live. I was instrumental in providing guidance and solutions to issues encountered with mobile design, organization of the code and problems that came up with the scripts.
The client needed the ability to update content on a regular basis and needed an easy solution for doing so. They also needed a way to manage and organize press releases, videos and articles.
Concrete5 was the Content Management System selected and approved for development. The challenge was to creatively organize existing content into the approved design with as few clicks as possible. My specific role in this project is outlined in the following paragraphs.
Wrote jquery and javascript modules to handle both data and video. Custom jquery menus and light boxes prevented the need for nested pages. An html site map was developed to organize content in a structured fashion. Then came up with a slider solution and integrated Javascript into the development environment. And finally, suggested and developed the blog (WordPress). The blog required each branch location to have specific information displayed only to them, and it had to be integrated with Concrete5 so that content is pulled content dynamically. This allowed the content editor to make updates in one location to be populated into the main website as well as displayed in the blog.
The information in the boxes on the Texas Trust CU home page contains some of the content that is dynamically generated for the site. Blog content is also generated in certain locations of the main website.
This website is pretty content heavy and required strategic thinking on how to handle content. For instance, the glossary previously used anchor tags to jump to a different location on the page to display the definition. I was able to create a pure CSS glossary of terms list that displayed the definition of a term on mouseover. This also prevented the need for additional javascript or jquery.
The blog is developed on a WordPress platform. The design was modified slightly and integrated into the system.still remaining consistent with the original Concrete5 site. Custom HTML & CSS Layout and CSS are the structure of the design. Custom page templates with PHP functions and queries to the database handles custom page content. Development documentation and staff training on Content editing was provided upon completion.
Both user and developer documentation were written for the blog to assist with ease of site hand-off. You may view the final project by clicking on the images below.
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Web Development Skills Used
Skills used: HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT, JQUERY, PHP, DATABASE QUERY, USER DOCUMENTATION
Wrote custom php modules using WordPress built-in functionality and php custom php database queries to create custom page templates. This allowed the user ability to select pre-defined templates for creating new pages in WordPress.
Wrote custom php modules to export data from the WordPress Database used in site migration from the development server to the live server and wrote custom jquery modules to expand and collapse data. This helped with the organization of content-heavy pages. Client needed the ability to perform backup, SEO, and Search.
Click the image to view the blog
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Search ability was developed to allow searching data by branch location or keyword. The blog was built on an empty or blank framework which means a Custom WordPress Theme had to be built to compliment the original design. It also required importing additional content from another blogging system. Importing this data saved manual copy and paste of 400 articles. A solution for migrating content was implemented. A solution for content backup was also provided to client upon hand-off. Content from the original website had to be organized and categorized. While SEO was not a concern, additional care was taken to retain structure that could boost search engine rankings. The system was set up to accommodate SEO for the staff Content Editors.