I’m pleased to announce the relaunch of Espec.com.

Espec is the “world’s largest manufacturer of environmental test chambers, offering the widest selection and highest quality equipment” and is located here in West Michigan.

From a business perspective, the project goals were to clarify the product category structure, offer more product detail and specifications, more product photos, all in a more attractive and up to date design.

Boyink Interactive created the design, and it’s implemented in a fluid manner to accommodate a high-tech audience with high resolution monitors.

From a technical/implementation perspective, the site runs on ExpressionEngine, and is hosted at EngineHosting.

From an ExpressionEngine implementation perspective, the site has a few notable elements.  First is extensive use of content relationships.  The only place EE categories are used to organize content is in the Chamber FAQ, otherwise all content structures are relationship-driven. 

The default EE relationship abilities are extended in a couple of ways - one being some custom queries and a dedicated weblog setup to allow relationships to be positioned/explained (see the Related Products section on this product page for an example).  The site also uses the multi-relationship extension from Mark Huot to allow a variable number of FAQ’s, Downloads and Options to be assigned to a product.

The EE Photo Gallery Module is incorporated into the site, allowing multiple product images to be connected to a product page.

The FreeForm module from Solspace powers the Request a Quote forms that appear on product pages.

From a sheer content perspective, this is a relatively large site - so kudos need to go out to the Espec crew responsible for doing the content entry.  At last glance there are 344 entries in 13 different weblogs, and much of that content is highly detailed specification information (the main products weblog has 52 content fields!).

Congratulations to Espec on completing the site - I’m happy to see it up to begin 2008 with!