Spring O’Brien

WordPress and Ajax

The goals for this site re-design were to modernize the look and feel of the site, to use a CMS (Content Management System) and to also keep the interactive-feel of their previous flash site.

The more we work with WordPress as a CMS the more we like it and the more things we figure out how to do with it. One of the things we haven’t tried yet was using WordPress with Ajax… Without nerding out too much, Ajax is basically a coding technique that lets you bring new content into a web page without re-loading the page, which makes a HTML site feel more like a flash site.

You can see this in action on our work section. When you cllick through the different thumbnails below the large image it reloads the large image from the server without reloading the page.

Another example is on the ‘Our People’ section. If you click the frames at the top of the screen it loads different people into the page from their wordpress ‘page’ without reloading the browser page… sounds confusing I know, better to just click through to the site and check it out:

Pretty cool huh! We’d like to say it’s easy to acheive, but it’s really not It took a lot of working out bugs and experimenting.

Don’t hide things that are important

Another feature of the site (if you can call this a feature) is a consistent navigation. It’s always tempting to consolidate navigation in a dropdown, but rarely is it necessary or beneficial to the user. Spring O’Brien’s old site had everything buried in one drop down, so the navigation wasn’t taking up any space, but as you went from page to page you had to keep expanding the menu, which got redundant. The bigger problem though is that it made it hard to find the navigation at all since it was so nicely hidden in the design as one small word that said ‘menu’.