Pemaquid Communications

A little over a week ago the Pemaquid team launched a new site for Oakhurst Dairy, a venerable Maine company expertly run by Stan Bennett and his family for three generations. The Oakhurst brand stands for high quality, and so we wanted to make sure that Maine’s largest dairy had a Web presence that measured up.

Most importantly, Oakhurst was looking for a better content management system that would give Marketing Director Jim Lesser and his staff more flexibility to quickly and easily update many different types of content throughout the site. We responded by building a custom version of the Pemaquid Content Manager, adding special modules for handling Products, “marquee spots” on the home page (“Nature’s Perfect Food”, etc.) and features on student Athletes of the Week.

Other modules were tailored to Oakhurst’s content needs, and the flexibility of the Content Manager allowed us to easily adjust the presentation of many different types of content, such as the company timeline.

In terms of design, we were able to have some fun with Oakhurst’s wonderful signature “landscape” graphic, a pastoral scene depicting the Maine countryside. We used some advanced CSS to nail the landscape to the bottom of the viewspace in front of a division containing the other content for the page. As a nifty little trick, when you scroll to the bottom of the page you’ll see the sun rise (unless you’re viewing in Internet Explorer 6; unfortunately, IE6 doesn’t support the display of transparent PNG graphics used in the landscape overlay. We used some conditional CSS to detect IE6 and serve up a different version of the scene for that browser).

The landscape graphic is quite a bit larger than we’d have liked (about 538k), but should perform fine for a wide majority of screen resolutions and connection speeds, according to site traffic statistics. And we’re continuing to tweak.

Other unique features include the interactive Products display (fortified with CSS, jQuery and AJAX), and an interactive Job application module that works like an e-commerce checkout and allows job seekers to save a profile they can use to quickly apply for future positions.

All in all, we hope the site is a good example of the wholesome natural goodness of Maine Web design.

We have to tip our caps to CIO Paul Connelly, who runs a well-oiled machine, and especially to Tim Hundt, our contact for project management. Tim kept everything very well organized from start to finish. Oakhurst’s IT staff kept us on our toes and challenged us to do our best work.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 3:58 am by Rob and is filed under Ajax, Business, CSS, Clients, Maine Web sites, Oakhurst Dairy, Web Design, content management systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.