Spring O’Brien

October 29, 2009

Spring O’Brien is a PR and media relations agency based in Manhattan. We re-designed their outdated flash website to modernize the look and feel and enable them to manage the content by adding a CMS.

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 learned on this project 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.

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’.