Integrating with a University Research Database

About the Client

Future Energy Systems is the largest University of Alberta research program to date. With over $75 million in funding, over 40 active projects, and over 1000 research personnel around the world, this program is focused on enabling the shift towards sustainable energy alternatives.

About the Project

Future Energy Systems required an integration with their research database in order to pull all project and researcher information to their public website. A custom module was developed in WebGuide to supplement the imported data allowing for the addition of banner images, additional content, galleries, and addition files. The objective for this project was to organize a wealth of information into something easily accessible and digestible.

Services

Websites

Industry

Government

Visit the site

Colour coded sections, textured parallax backgrounds, and striking landing pages were all thoughtfully designed to breathe life into the program’s visual identity. The site is completely mobile friendly, collapsing beautifully into any screen size.

Throughout the website, you will see over well over 30 custom made icons that help to highlight stats and distinguish the 4 main categories of research their corresponding sub-themes (ie. Improving Environmental Performance and Non-Electric Infrastructure).

It was paramount to create connectivity between various modules so that redundancies in content management were eliminated for FES administrators – for example, by tagging news posts appropriately, they are automatically pulled to the relevant research category page and listed in the main news feed. For the size and complexity of this website, maintaining it is simple, quick, and painless.

The meat of this website is research related data. Our development team relished the integration with the University’s research database. From this central database, we import a variety of data-sets related to researchers, faculties, publications, and projects. We even created a custom Research Module which allows FES administrators to add further information to imported projects for the front-facing website; banners, galleries, and additional files all help to polish the project for the web.