Machinery Row Site Launch

I have just completed a free lance project I have been working on for quite some time. www.machineryrowbicycles.com is a catalog based web site.

Their are many bike shop websites out there, however they all sort of look and are organized the same. I wanted to to try something a bit different. I spent a large portion of time thinking about the information structure and the design of the site. I tried to get some things highlighted on the home page from every important section with large images with out making a really long site.

One of the biggest challenges in the build was the amount of ways to sort the same data. I started out with the bike section. Bikes can be sorted by type, price, brand, size, etc… I decided that the most logical way to sort these was by type, then give the user the ability to sort by the brand. Long term I would like to add a sort by price option but have yet to build this.

I also tried out some new technologies and ideas on this site. I have been tinkering with jQuery a lot on this project and have to say that it is a great tool for adding interaction to a site. I also started using microformats here and their and hope this will help with SEO. One other SEO trick I am trying is using html text for the header graphic.

The site was built out on Expression Engine, which has proven to be an excellent tool!