EE in the Wild: Northpower
Pro Network member Iain posted to the EE Forums about a newly launched site for Northpower, an electricity contracting company in New Zealand.
Iain described the site as “challenging” and described some of the work they had to do to pull it off:
As some areas are 5 levels deep (like here) which were a bit of fun, we decided to use the EE pages Module extensively. We built our own module interface (Pages Improved), and publish page extension to make the whole setup a lot more usable for publishers. Tasks like ordering pages, selecting a page parent and bulk renaming page uris were some features we put in.
Be sure to read Iain’s entire form post for links and information about the other customizations needed for the Northpower website.
Posted on Aug 15, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
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Kyle Batson — 16:09 on 08.15.2009
While an interesting solution, to me it just strikes as bad information design. Many of those pages that are ‘landing pages’ for subsections have little to no unique content on them. In many cases you have to click through 3 or 4 times to actually get to any content. In my opinion, when you start getting to 4 levels deep, it might be a good idea to rethink your information architecture a bit.
Iain — 01:50 on 08.17.2009
Hi Guys,
first up, thanks EE insider for the showcase, muchas gracias.
Kyle, I have exactly the same concerns and it is something we plan to address as we gain analytical data and feedback from usability tests in the coming weeks/months.
While it’s sometimes easy to point at other peoples work and say that its “bad information design” - with all due respect you are not the one one dealing with various stakeholder groups, IT departments, budgets & deadlines, please remember that
The launch is certainly not regarded as the end of the project, thankfully everyone on board sees this as the official start of the project.
Thanks again.