MRP
This commission was for a fully-populated, complex website from the Bristol office of large architectural partnership Mason Richards Partnership. (MRP is now part of the RPS Group and the MRP website has been taken down.)
The site was to have twelve separate main sections, several of which could have extensive subsections, depending on the enthusiasm of the department involved.
The usability of the website would depend crucially on internal cross-links and references and ensuring consistency and validity of those links across major structural changes was of paramount importance.
The institution-sized budgets which funded typical MRP projects (entire housing developments, roads, etc) meant a high profile amongst commissioning clients on the Net and correspondingly high production values in the website build.
Page structure templates were agreed early
on so that structure and content could be developed independently of
styling.
To facilitate easy and rapid change of the website structure during development, a mill was implemented in Python.
The existence of page structure templates enabled content to be regularised and handled programmatically, event to the extent of generating thumbnail graphics for the department-level index pages.
Website tree structure was replicated in a Python list, the structure of which determined the structure of the website, e.g.
[index:
[planning_index:
[ [project1, project2, project3] ]]
[architecture_index:
[ [commercial_index: project1, project2]
[housing_index: project1, project2]]
[find_us_index:
[bristol, birmingham, london]]
...
]
this list structure not only enabled a consistent, extensive yet easily changed navigation scheme to be introduced but also enabled the automatic processing and inclusion of any content --- which could simply be dropped into the relevant "receipt" folder in order to add a few more illustrations or even another entire project, for example.