I’m pleased to announce a new website for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, otherwise known as PhRMA.
The project was less about a visual redesign than repowering the site using ExpressionEngine as a content management system so that PhRMA and it’s PR agency could update the site directly. We did, however, take advantage of the opportunity to recode in order to both lose the table-based layout and make the design fluid-width, as well as add some other subtle visual niceties.
From an implementation perspective, the site uses the Pages module from Mark Huot to provide a sitemap based content management interface for the site administrators. The module also generates the second-level navigation, breadcrumb trail, sitemap and URLs.
The trickiest part of the site - aside from being entirely in a langauge that I neither read nor speak a lick of - is the Materials Request Form, which is built dynamically. PhRMA staff can control what shows on the form by simply assigning the section entry for the publication to a specific “Materials Request Form” category.
The langauge issue was handled by building out the site using English placeholder text in order to get everything functional and looking right. Once trained in how the system worked, the PhRMA staff then migrated the Japanese content in. To handle any text stored in the template code, etc. I went through the entire site and put together a spreadsheet of the words and the context in which they appeared. The PhRMA folks then added the Japanese translations to the spreadsheet and I worked back through the site replacing the English terms with Japanese.
All in all this was an interesting and challenging project!
A overview with some screenshots is now available in the portfolio section here on Boyink.com.
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Michael Montgomery on March 01, 2007
Boyink (Author) on March 03, 2007
Ira Wolf on April 07, 2007
Boyink (Author) on April 07, 2007