Open House: Archives

The intersection between "real life" and a Web presence can be subtle. To the general public, what, really, is Facebook other than Facebook.com? How is ESPN.com different from ESPN as a company?

With some clients, though, the difference is night and day.

Global Diving & Salvage, Inc., is, as the press releases note, "the largest diving contractor company on the West coast." It has an "international reach and a focus on marine construction, infrastructure support services and casualty response". All of that is well and good and impressive, but words alone struggle to capture the...reality... of what the company does. Divers spend hours and even days in cramped submersibles at depths that would crush an unprotected human body. They handle and clean up sensitive materials that can do serious damage to the environment. They work as a team in hazardous conditions every day.

Compare that to, say, me. I type quickly and I know some stuff about the Web. How do I help capture what Global does?

One of the ways PBDH tried to bring "real life" to a browser near you is by demonstrating the scope of Global's projects. Global's new Web site has advanced mapping features that highlight cross North America and even the world, allowing visitors to see highlighted projects as well as where Global is today.

And I do mean today.

Global Web admins have the ability to add and edit projects as progress is made through an easy content management system. Done with the job in New York? Upload some pictures and put it in the archives. Kicking off a new gig in Alaska? Link to a story from a news outlet or embed a video talking about the work. The Web site also pulls in the latitude and longitude information and uses that to accurately place the projects on the maps. Automatically.

This was pushing what we knew from a technical perspective and it was pushing what the available Web applications could do; we brought in a consultant who's been on the front lines of geomapping and he helped us create a custom-designed map that combines real GIS mapping data with project locations stored in the CMS.

The Web site didn't teach me how to weld underwater, but there's a bit more "real life" in this site than in most.