The Web Design Museum
The Design Collaborative Homepage
The Design Collaborative Homepage

Exhibit, launched February 2010

The Design Collaborative

Website re-design for a Cape May County Architecture Firm

Technology stack used

HTMLCSSJavaScriptjQueryPHPCodeIgniterMySQL

Project goals

The design collaborative has their original site created in 2005. Some of the techniques used on the website needs to be upgraded as they were inaccessible to many devices. They also wished that the interface be cleaned up and simplified. The original site had a custom backend (written by us) which need to be upgraded to give them more control than previously possible.

Solution

We rewrote the whole database and backend to now run on PHP/MySQL. CodeIgniter was used to organize the site's code and functionality. With new tools at their disposal they're able to control every page on the website including the data in the project gallery, the biddable projects area and even the solar energy savings data for the different school districts on the site.

Design Collaborative website design project detail page.
Design Collaborative website design project detail page.
Design Collaborative website Form Profile page.
Design Collaborative website Form Profile page.
Design Collaborative website school energy data page.
Design Collaborative website school energy data page.
See it live in 2010 (opens in a new tab)

The web in 2010

What was the web like back then?

  • Top browser

    IE8

    55% of users were using Internet Explorer

  • Screen size

    1024×768

    on a 15-inch flat screen

  • High-speed internet

    39%

    of US adults didn't have high-speed internet at home

Building for the web in 2010

  • New this year

    The iPad, Google Fonts and responsive web design all showed up. Steve Jobs said no to Flash.

  • Couldn't do yet

    CSS gradients in Internet Explorer. They were still images until IE10 in 2012.