ClarkDietrich: Corporate Web Site Built in Drupal

Ars Nova recently completed a new web site for ClarkDietrich Building Systems.

The new site included several challenging requirements, including:

• extremely deep product menus,
• shared (duplicate) content between pages and sections,
• rotating featured products,
• an autocompleting product search utility,
• and links to external web applications (customizable per page).

Interactive Products Navigation

The products section at ClarkDierich.com contains several hundred products, split into 50 categories. Creating a navigation system for a complex hierarchy is one of the most challenging tasks a web developer can face. We created a jQuery-based accordion menu for the products section. This type of menu allows visitors to dive into multi-tiered menus fairly intuitively.

We wrote the custom jQuery menus in such a way that the site will degrade gracefully — users with JavaScript disabled will be directed to a product sitemap.

Other Challenges

In the coming weeks, we will write blog articles explaining how we met the rest of the challenges.

ClarkDietrich first became a client back in 2008 when we created SubmittalPro, their online submittal generator.