America's Fish, TEN|10 launch McNally sites

America's Fish and the TEN|10 Group launched a new website Wednesday for the McNally Group and redesigns of its companies' websites, McNally Industries, Sun Country Industries and Pacific Aero Tech.

The family of companies work in the defense and commercial aerospace industries. The parent company, McNally Group, is based in Greenwood Village and came to us to create an identity for the new central entity and bring its companies under one look and branding, including websites, logo, business cards and letterhead.

The biggest challenge and one that somewhat ongoing is to define what the companies do individually and what they do together. There is a reason the McNally Group has gathered these three companies as well as Northern Pump, a fourth company that was not included in the redesign. There is overlap in what they do, but looking at each company's old website didn't make clear what connection they had to each other. The first phase for the group was to bring them together under one look that suited all three companies. The next phase might be to evolve slightly back in the other direction as each company's site takes on a personality specific to its strengths.

The sites are designed and developed in Drupal, which was an ideal choice to handle four websites that need to maintain somewhat separate functions but are generally monitored and managed by the same group of people. Among the challenges we addressed:

Variant looks: While we wanted the sites to follow one general look, we also wanted to help differntiate each company. We adopted a desaturated look for the group of sites and consistent blue that appears throughout. McNally Group then added a vibrant, patriotic red to its palette and the company sites each took on metallic secondary colors, gold, silver and copper.

Multisite code base: Using Drupal we were able to run the four websites from a single code base. While the sites remain separate, keeping the software up to date is a much easier process because a user only needs to update files once then run a script on each site to update the database tables.

Multisite search: The main site, www.mcnally-group.com, is the center of the larger group of sites but the information many potential custoers will want is on the individual company sites. We included a multisite search on the primary site that allows a user to search the database tables for all sites from the first one.

News gathering: While the structure of the site is top down going from McNally Group to the company sites, the news generated from the sites works in the opposite direction with notices about major and minor events related to the each company being produced at a local level and aggregated by the primary site. Using a module called FeedAPI, we are able to bring the news from the company sites into nodes on the primary site.