Intermediate Capital Group – Website
ICG wanted a corporate refresh to their main website. They also wanted to integrate a corporate-level CMS into the mix, allowing them to have a lot of control of not only what the content was, but how it was presented and where it sat in the site hierarchy.
Details…
Layout Highlights
I was tasked with taking the super-talented designer’s mockups, and turning them into clean, semantic markup that could easily be integrated into the CMS of choice. In this case, the CMS was Microsoft Sharepoint 2010. I had to make sure that the normal elements from Saherpoint would work in the layout, and make sure that nothing broke when It got integrated.
This was also the first project that required me to do any font-importing. Since there was such a high number of elements that needed to use Helvetica Neue, options like sIFR (which is terrible anyways) and Cufon would have slowed the page down too much. We opted to go with webfonts.fonts.com, as they’re fast and own the rights to the font we needed.
Portions of the layout required a bit of extra thinking, as there were a lot of transparent gradients that needed to be incorporated to achieve the desired effect. I also had to make sure that the layout was flexible enough with user-generated contend that nothing broke. These two aspects together made for some interesting challenges.
Front-end Highlights
ICG has a lot of information that they wanted to display to the end-user. Massing this all on the page would have made things horrifyingly convoluted, and so an alternate solution needed to be found. The decision to address this problem was to use javascript sliders. As I’ve done previous jQuery plugin development, this wasn’t really an issue. At first. As we started development, we found that the complex nature of some of the panels caused noticeable lag in certain browsers when being animated.
The cause of this, as it worked out, was a simple matter of overkill. The plugin I had originally used (a plugin I developed that we now use in many projects) needed cleaning up and refining. At the time, I didn’t have time to go line-by-line to fix the plugin as a whole, so I opted to take option 2: make a new one.
I cannibalized the original slider code, but stripped away everything that wasn’t needed for ICGs new website. This resulted in a massive speed increase that solved the issue.
Though this is still an ongoing project, the website has been live for a while, and is constantly being iterated through and improved. Everyone was pretty happy with how this project worked out.
Website – http://www.icgplc.com/