The Situation

db&b began in 1996, rising to be one of the region's premier provider of
interior design and related services with offices in Singapore,
Malaysia, China and the Philippines.

Primarily specialising in commercial design, they have become a full service company that have worked in nearly every sector of business.

With such a successful expansion throughout Asia, a new web site was needed to give the prospective clients the right impression when researching the companies capabilities on-line.

This coincided with recent fine tuning of their coporate identitly, messaging and various collaterals including their excellent printed brochure.

The Challenge

We new we were in for a chalenge dealing with a top design company as a client. Designers are renowned to be 'fussy' and 'particular' over anything that is of personal interest. It comes with the territory.

Knowing this we convinced them we could deliver a web site they would be proud to represent as db&b's own. The challenge was in the various requirements and not just the design.

As per usual with design based sites, Flash was a must, but also some form of content editing or CMS (content management system). The two items do not normally go well together.

Also they needed two types of portfolio, one for their cream of the crop work to display the top photography taken and the other to hold a more comprehensive showcase of all their work to date.

The Solution

After a solid brain storming session with the client to understand their requirements and another one with the rest of the Ad.WRIGHT team, we new we had to put together a very custom project that allowed the full advantage of Flash but storing and accessing the information through a database.

We chose to combine the power of traditional CMS with its ability to manage users, editing and database while adding addtional features that allowed us to upload pictures and content, while still being able to add addtional pages to the Flash areas if needed.

The Result

Delivered within 2 months, we handed over a web site that not only hit their design expectations but also functional requirements. Essentially we had developed a two part web site built around the different portfolios, one in full Flash and one as a hybrid of Flash and CMS. Both completely and easily updated by db&b themselves.

Because Flash is making a strong come back with the bandwidth available to everyone, this scenario will become the anwser more often as clients require more and more Flash content.

One more advantage is the SEO (search engine optimization) is still workable in this type of custom build site as search robots can still index indvidual pages and content even though it is embedded in the Flash. We can still make it accessible via the database using XML and RSS.

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