The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) launched a major online architecture exhibition on 3rd June 2007 to complement the BBC’s new flagship arts series, How We Built Britain. The How We Built Britain (HWBB) exhibition explores a thousand years of British architecture through a dedicated website featuring a huge gallery of architecture from all areas of Britain.
The big build
.gif)
The HWBB website has been built using the Contensis R4 Web Content Management System and is a small taster of the full RIBA website due to launch later this year.
Empowering creativity
The website, output to XHMTL standards, features ultra-sharp design by Nameless and includes an intelligent 'building block' layout and a set of standardised designs, both of which take into account the importance of accessibility, readability and functionality.
The Contensis CMS has provided the RIBA development team with a wealth of static and dynamic templates to complement this - empowering their creative streak when needed, but always refining the content to set layouts and Metadata categorisation. The combination of clean design, intelligent content management and powerful templating has allowed for exploration of the design guidelines without stepping outside of its boundaries.
The HWBB virtual gallery has been built with the future implementation requirements of the RIBA website firmly in mind. When the main RIBA website goes live, the HWBB gallery will seamlessly integrate with any search or data integration and other RIBA galleries that may be implemented in the future and will also fit appropriately into the navigation structure.
A powerful set of templates:
See the online exhibition
If you are interested in taking a closer look then please navigate to www.architecture.com/howwebuiltbritain|. In the television series that the website accompanies David Dimbleby will trace the social history of Britain through its architectural heritage from the Middle Ages to the 20th Century. 'How We Built Britain' will broadcast on BBC One from June 2007.
About the company
The Contensis Enterprise Content Management suite of products began life, as many products do, following an animated discussion between a group of software professionals back in the autumn of 1998.
They all agreed, after exhaustive evaluation, that most of the products then available fell far short of their own vision and an idea began to gel. By spring 1999 work was well advanced on the specification of a system which not only met their criteria, and that of respected industry analysts, but equally important also reflected the views of end user enterprises. Power, ease of use and cost effectiveness were the key words. The beginnings of the Contensis development team were spawned a little later and work started in earnest to turn the dream into reality.
Philosophy
Our approach is completely customer-centric. Customers are our universe and we see their problems as our problems.
From a software perspective this means that we strive to ensure that every aspect of Contensis is simple to learn and easy to use. We believe we've achieved that, certainly at everyday user level. Even newcomers to the system are normally editing and contributing within minutes.
It's all part of our 'How can we make it simpler' approach.
About Contensis Enterprise CMS
Built using the Microsoft® .Net platform Contensis ECMS features an open API that facilitates easy and rapid integration with virtually any application, and is completely intuitive to use at every level.
One of the very few CMS solutions that combines the best of dynamic and flat file publishing, it has proved itself in the most demanding of circumstances and is fully scalable.