B2B Cambodia | Phnom Penh

B2B Cambodia is a half-yearly published business magazine and a website portal with in-depth insights (interviews with experts, articles on business related subjects, issues and trends, and an extensive news archive) into doing business in Cambodia.

The website needed an overhaul, as the design was outdated and – very important – navigation and views on mobile devices were poor. For the new website a commercial WordPress theme was bought. That sounds easy: just change a few colours, insert the logo, update the content and done, right? Wrong!

While there was not much to do on the design front (except indeed, colours, fonts, and logos), this was quite a large project. Not in the least because the old website was custom coded by a previous developer which made it a challenge to port over all existing content to the new theme. Another challenge was the poor support of this theme for so-called ‘custom post types’. We had to change quite some code (in a child theme) to make it work as desired by the client. We won’t bore you with all the technical details, though. Let’s look at the website’s appearance.

The Home Page consists of a large top grid where the latest ‘Featured’ articles appear. Underneath are ‘blocks’ with content from the ‘Articles’, ‘News’ and ‘Business Directory’ sections. A visitor can select subcategories or scroll through items. This is all done via ‘AJAX’, meaning it all happens without refreshing the page.

At the top, under the menu item ‘Articles’ is a so-called Mega Menu (screenshot 2) where visitors also can scroll through articles in different sections. Clicking on the link in the left menu brings them to the page with content from that category only. By the way, this is one of the parts where we custom coded to make it work as desired.

The website includes a large business directory (screenshot 3) with a range of search options (by category, location, keyword, date, title, and rating). It also includes an option to search within a radius of the visitors current position. Some businesses are highlighted on separate pages with content from their directory listing inserted (screenshot 4).

When reading an article, in the right sidebar are suggestions for further reading (‘Related Articles’) and advertisements. When scrolling down, these suggested other articles and advertisements stay in place! See screenshot 5.

And of course the new B2B website automatically adjusts to screen sizes and is optimized for mobiles (screenshot 6), which includes an easy to navigate mobile menu.

b2b-cambodia.com