We have had a busy end of the year, in the last month we have launched four new website projects… here’s a quick overview of each of them:

Revolution Events are one of our oldest and most prolific clients, we have a great working relationship with them. Our latest website for them showcases their new event, focussing on sustainability within the procurement sector, we designed the logo and branding as well as the site itself.  The work is not over once the site is launched, we will be producing print ads, online advertising, event flyers, brochures and programmes. We even create online information portals leading up to the site build, where suppliers and stand builders can find any relevant information they need…

The event site can be found here: www.spssummit.com

Morris & Blunt are a local building contractors, we designed a nice, clean simple website for them to showcase their talents. Our work included designing, programming, location photography and copy writing…

www.morrisandblunt.com

The Colchester Theatre Group needed a new website to showcase their shows and provide information for the actors. We designed a WordPress based website so they can edit and add the content themselves. The design enables them to create feature shots for each show on the home page, all edited and created within the content management system. The site has a lovely feel to it, and it was great to work on an arts-based project.

You can view the site here: www.colchestertheatregroup.org

Just Maternity Jeans was a project created by a good friend of ours, we helped her with the design of her new web project selling a wide range of fashionable maternity jeans. Working with her web developer, we focussed on the branding, website design and illustrative graphics. We also coded the html for the programmer, he took our files and integrated all the back-end functionality for the eCommerce and produced the rest of the pages. Why not give her new business a boost by recommending her site to anyone who’s after ‘nice’ maternity wear!

www.justmaternityjeans.com

Websites benefit greatly from some movement to add interest and be more dynamic. Generally these moving elements have been created in Flash – sometimes whole sites. However, with the growing importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Flash elements have become more problematic because of their poor performance in these search engines. Now with the rapidly increasing consumption of websites on smartphones such as iPhones and Blackberries as well as other mobile devices such as iPads, there is an even bigger problem – they don’t support Flash technology at all. This is a major problem for web developers especially given that around 95% of online advertising uses Flash. Apple for one remains staunchly anti-Flash, stating that they will not allow the Flash plugins to run on their mobile products, leaving developers with websites that when viewed on the iPhone or iPad do not offer the complete experience they were designed to give.

Web development is an ever-changing beast and we try to keep up with the latest approaches, taking stock of what is happening within the industry and spending time researching new techniques and methods. Whilst we had long-abandoned wholly Flash-based websites, favouring sites built using common CSS/HTML programming with just small sections of Flash to create interest, we recognised that we needed to find a solution to this problem, not least for our own site.

So, we took it upon ourselves to deliver a ‘Flash-less’ website that will be viewed perfectly on all devices, including the iPhone and iPad without losing the motion and dynamic elements we had designed in the first place. The main concerns were the randomly generated case study imagery on the home page, and out entire catalogue of projects. Our new design has utilised some of the new animation techniques that do not require the use of Flash. For those of you with an inclination to wear an anorak, a new breed of Java Script called JQuery is the driver for these sections of our site, alongside further use of CSS and HTML. We were able to create an image slider consisting of a few JPG files, and for the projects we used a clever gallery method that also used simple image files animating within a gallery framework. To the viewer there is little difference – unless of course you are on a smartphone where the experience is now comparable with viewing the site on a PC.

The benefits have been an interesting learning curve for us, the excitement of making JPGs move across the screen without the use of Flash, the added bonus of better SEO performance (we can now add tags to our image files within our new animated sections) and Stephen can read our site properly on his iPhone! Of course, all future web projects for our clients will benefit greatly from this.