ASC Group

The ASC Group, Inc website was a total rebuild project that presented its brand in a more sophisticated light than previously for its business with six regional offices, each fully staffed with experts in key service areas for cultural, environmental, and hazardous consulting and evaluation (mostly archaeological expertise). Within the three core service areas, market expertise is focused on Federal, Transportation, Energy Development, and Airport verticals.

Advanced Post Filtering

A major feature of the website is to feature ASC Group projects.  We used the Category Ajax Filter Pro plugin with a spec that we had to present numerous horizontal drop-down filters. This presented a challenge as using a standard post category would stack all filters in one drop-down.  To achieve the horizontal display as desired, we created custom taxonomies that enabled the desired design flexibility with a lot of custom CSS to control appearance to match the Sullivan Solutions design that the client approved.

Custom Team Member Page

With a large team of professionals, one of our tasks was to develop a single detailed team profile page without linking to separate profile pages.  For each picture on the team page (alphabetical by last name), hovering over the photo produces a pop-up grid displaying team members’ contact details, including their vCard, PDF Bio, and LinkedIn profile.

Using an existing plugin or builder template to display team information is common.  However, with a spec for a bespoke design, we developed the team grid facing challenges to ensure consistent quality display in a standard laptop, extra large monitor (seen typically in their target audience), and mobile devices.

On the backend, for Team Members, we created a custom post type with custom fields and taxonomies to make it easy for ASC Group administrative staff to manage their personnel easily.

Other Challenges

The mandated design layouts presented challenges as the approach was largely desktop-first to assuage the client.  We had to address mobile-first as mobile second in the design implementation since we had no control over the desired layout. Still, we had to observe the vital need to address some unique problems for the mobile display.

We used the Divi (child) theme with massive use of the Divi custom Theme Builder to control some unique headers and an unusual design that displayed a full-width top of page masthead, but the content area below was limited to a more narrow 55% central width based on a 1090 px wide page.  Without creating a huge issue with layout shift, we had to devise a method to provide a resilient mobile page – whether a landscaped or portrait phone or tablet layout.

Details

Launched April 2022
https://www.ascgroup.net/​