If ever there was an interesting client for someone who likes big boys toys, this was it!
Gibbs are designers and manufacturers of the World’s most advanced amphibious vehicles. They required a website which would not only showcase their vehicles, but one which would also act as a content-managed PR and Media portal.
To achieve this, I decided after consulting with Gibbs, that an off-the-shelf content management system would be too inflexible for their needs, as in addition to offering password-protected content to the Press, Gibbs also wanted to be able to send personalised email invites to both Press and commercial contacts.
I set about designing a PHP/MySQL based system, which would allow managers at Gibbs to produce email invitations of different types for different sectors (Press, Commercial and those we hadn’t thought of yet!). The invites would include a link to the relevant section of the website – and where required a link to a personalised page detailing either a product sector (military vehicles for example), or a particular product.
In the case of prospective customers, the “call to action” was either more product information, or a “call me back” button. Press contacts were able to download pre-built info sheets, high-resolution photographs and video clips delivered by a streaming server.
In all cases, the system wrote details of the users actions to it’s database, enabling Gibbs managers to see in real-time, the actions of their contacts. They enjoyed being able to call a prospect and say “I see you’re looking at our Amphbians… can I help you further?”.
Definitely great fun to build, and a great front-end design utilising Flash and embedded Flash movies.