Ideas of how to present large amount of (categorised) content elegantly on a page

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1

Hi,

Working on a site for a client who doesn’t want the visitor to be confronted with huge amounts of text when first opening the pages. They’d prefer the site be more visual/image oriented and would prefer the relevant text/content related to each of the services they provide be presented only when the user clicks on relevant links or images.

Wondering if you can point any good examples of websites that pull this off elegantly?

The business provides about 40-50 specific services, that can be grouped into about 4-5 categories. Each service that they provide will have about a paragraph of text and a few images.

I’ve toyed with the idea of lightboxes with HTML content or accordions or tabs, but haven’t really seen any websites that have pulled it off elegantly. They prefer the content area to be fixed height (no scrollbars).

Would love to hear your ideas and would appreciate if you could point to some good examples.

Thanks.
VWD

2

Vuall seems to be something like what you’re after. http://www.lglab.co.uk/vuAll/
Quicksand looks to provide a nice interface to filter things down too. http://razorjack.net/quicksand/

There’s a wide range of different types of ones that are out there though. Are you just looking for inspiration at this stage?

3

Thanks for those suggestions Paul - they’re really interesting scripts, which I’ll keep up my sleeve.

Since posting, we’ve made a little progress and further refined what we’re after. Each category of services will be in its own page. So each page will have 5-10 ‘services’. Each service would have a paragraph of text and a couple of images. Rather than presenting a table or list of services with the paragraph of text and corresponding images, I was envisaging something more fancy. (See my note below about Vuall - looked promising)

I guess you could say inspiration and ideas. One thing I neglected to mention is that the site is to be responsive. Vuall looked really interesting (ie able to present the ‘thumbnails’ without a even grid) but it doesn’t appear to be responsive.

It’s looking more and more like a grid of thumbnail images launching lightboxes with the related content (i.e. paragraph of text + images). But would really like to see if there are some more exciting ideas.

Thanks for those great suggestions Paul.

VWD.

4

By responsive, do you mean that you want it to reorganise when the window changes size, or do you want differently sized sections to automatically organise themself?

If the latter, there are things such as Isotope for example.
If the former, there’s a list of responsive layouts for you to browse through at http://creativecan.com/2012/12/jquery-plugins-for-responsive-layout/

5

Thanks Paul - will have a look at those suggestions.

VWD.