Custom Website and CMS for Agushi Constructions

DCODE is excited to announce the release of one of our latest project - a website and custom CMS for Agushi Constructions. The site presents a simple yet striking interface that hides a significant level of complexity behind the software. The result is a great looking site, fully managed by the client, with a suite of tools to make managing the site a breeze.

Agushi Constructions is a boutique residential building company that has established itself as a leading builder of contemporary homes in Melbourne’s inner suburbs.  When looking to refresh their website, they were keen to replicate the clean look & feel of Squarespace - however their requirements were more bespoke.

Working closely with Agushi, we designed a layout that emulated the clean look of Squarespace with a bespoke layout that could add to a point of difference for Agushi.

The home page features a large sliding carousel - taking full advantage of the screen.

One of the limitations of a full-page carousel is that often it causes images to be cropped in order to fit the required space.  Given the level of detail (and quality) of images presented by Agushi, cropping of the images across different devices resulted in an un-desired loss of detail.  In order to address this, the Projects pages were developed to ensure that the entire image could be seen on any device - desktop, tablet or mobile.  To do so, we used a horizontal scrolling gallery as per the image below:

In order to manage the site, DCODE developed a bespoke Administration Console.  Through this console, the client has the ability to maintain all aspects of the site.

The final step of the development was speed of the website.  Due to the "image heavy" nature of the site, the client was concerned that this would cause the website to be un-usable.  In order to address this, DCODE focussed on 2 aspects of the site - the optimisation of the images and optimising the architecture of the site.

To optimise the images, we developed an image rendering engine.  This service took the raw images (as uploaded by the client) and optimised these for both different sizes and different devices - thus ensuring that images were build and rendered to perform at their optimum without losing the quality of the pciture.

Using Amazon's AWS, we were able to launch an environment for the client that ensured assets/media were delivered in the most efficient manner - using servers, databases, flash storage and an image content delivery network (CDN) for optimum performance.

This project serves as an example of how a custom CMS can be a great alternative to off-the-shelf solutions.  The solution is simple, effective and presents a solid platform for on-going developments as the requirements of the client develop.  The early results of the website development have been fantastic and we look forward to building and enhancing the website with the team from Agushi.

If you're looking to update/redevelop a website, let's talk further to find out how we can be of assistance.  We have a strong understanding of both custom software and off-the-shelf solutions and can help you to build, manage and expand on your current solution. DCODE Group specialises in custom software solutions tailored to your specific business requirements.