We were all excited when we saw your site. It’s a beautiful site. Tell us a bit about it from your perspective.

When we began planning the information architecture we were looking for a solution that would give us the flexibility we needed, but would also give us a clean segmentation between presentation and business logic.

As a digital marketing agency we have used countless content management frameworks since we opened our doors, ranging from Open Source Content platforms like Joomla and Wordpress to more robust content management frameworks like Drupal, Ektron and Vignette.

Phase 1 launch of the Ovation site was a destination for nearly all the company’s domestic marketing. But since they market their products all over the world we needed to develop a strong foundation that would lend itself to extensibility as we expand their foreign reach to support their international distributors.

At first we considered a “Roll your own” solution using Zend or CodeIgniter, but after doing some more investigation we realized that the newer version of ExpressionEngine was completely built on the CodeIgniter framework. We really appreciated the way it incorporated newer features and a streamlined user interface for administering content and files.

ExpressionEngine offered us the flexibility we needed, and, most importantly, the extensibility for later developments, which we are currently developing for Ovation’s International audience and distribution channel.

Ovation is a brand that concentrates on and embraces technical innovation, so we felt it was really important to go with a platform that was advancing as fast and was as focused on innovation.

What Digital Surgeons team members did you utilize and what roles helped in the design process and implementation?

In addition to working with a very talented group of brand and product managers at Ovation we were able to canvas the marketing landscape and identify the various needs for the content management system from a functionality and data standpoint.

User experience and front-end design skillsets were critical in developing the UX and site design direction.
From an implementation perspective we leveraged a great deal of the ExpressionEngine 2.0 features as they had a lot of the many data aspects from CodeIgniter.

How did you choose ExpressionEngine?

At Digital Surgeons we’re very focused on using open source technologies,  and are primarily a LAMP shop.

We have worked with a number of content management frameworks in the open source community ranging from Drupal and Joomla to wordpress and Modx.
For web apps we work with the zend framework quite a bit, and for many of our projects we leverage that or Ellis Lab’s Code Ignitor framework for rolling out MVC driven applications.

We chose ExpressionEngine because of its streamlined admin panel. The clean administration interface was a huge value added for us and dramatically reduced the training time for our client.

What is the thing about this project you are most proud of?

Well, there are a number since it really was a top-to-bottom and side-to-side redo, but I’d have to say that executing such a large update for our client’s international brand presence was probably the most rewarding part of the project.

Leveraging HTML5 and modern web technologies was a lot of fun, and it was encouraging to have such a great client who understands the value of embracing innovation and technology in the service of their brand.

Are there any modules and plugins you utilized? If so, what were they?

Yes – we developed a number of custom modules and plugins for some of our custom needs, but let me focus some attention on some of the great ExpressionEngine plugins that we used in the development.

We used imgSizer for resizing and caching images on the fly, FF Matrix for handling specifications data within an the admin system and Playa for handling relationships between fields and content types.

We developed and implemented a few other custom modules to improve Search Engine Optimization and the way pages were rendered.
We also developed a custom field type for handling zipcodes and leveraged Google Map’s API for geocaching latitude and longitude data for later searching and data modeling needs.