Pure360 are an email marketing service provider based down in Brighton. They are great people with a fab product and creatively very switched on, so when I got asked whether I’d like to build and support their new website. I jumped at the chance.
It was definitely an interesting project to work on. We chose to build the site using the MySource Matrix content management system, which is a great piece of kit, but not one that I’d used before, so a bit of a learning curve! Ash, their designer came up with some brilliant designs so I got a chance to add some great visual effects to the site too.
It’s not often that I get handed handed projects where the structure, visual design and the copy have been pre-determined by the client. On one hand it’s great, because I haven’t designed it myself, it’s out of my ‘comfort zone’ and gives me a chance to try out new tools and techniques, on the other hand it means some serious head scratching to get the design to work. And whilst I wouldn’t want every project to be that way, it’s a great way to flex my techie muscles.
And so it was with the Pure360 website. They’re an email marketing service provider based down in Brighton, and seeing as they pretty much knew what they were doing when it came to designing websites, they just wanted someone to put the site together for them, then provide ongoing support. Oh yes, and the site needed to be live within a month!
The first challenge to procure a CMS. They didn’t have an existing solution, so after looking at various options we opted for MySource Matrix, a seriously powerful product at a pretty reasonable price. I’d never used it before, so that meant a pretty steep learning curve, but after a some training from the vendor and a few days with the manuals I started to get to grips with it and started to build some experimental versions of the functionality that we’d need.
The next stage was to build the templates. Their designer Ash put together some awesome designs. As ever, there were a few interesting challenges, a few fixed areas, lots of opacity, rollovers, a pop-up product tour and loading external content to save on page refreshes. The awesome jquery framework really came into it’s own here, I don’t know how I lived without it.
The final step was to build the site in the CMS. I built the core site on a development server, then transferred it across to the production machine once I’d got everything working as I wanted. It’s not a massive site, there are about 15 templates and probably less than 100 pages, but within those pages are lots of nested items, including Asset Lists (lists of content), forms, RSS feeds, a blog and a site search. One of the great things about MySource Matrix is that you can use the same asset in different ways in different places.
As of today the site is now live at www.pure360.com. There are still a few things that I’d like to change, and I’ve heard threats of a phase two, but in the meantime, please go and take a look.
