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We recently launched a new website for the Buzzard’s Bay Regatta, an annual sail boat race that happens in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. It was a fun site to build, and as the design lead I was given a lot of creative freedom to come up with a look and feel. The client had an awesome collection of photos featuring different classes of boats that race in the Regatta which they wanted to showcase as prominently as possible.
We came up the idea of including a list of vessel classes on every page, allowing the user to click on any class and use it as a page background. Pretty neat, huh? One pretty serious problem: while this worked great on the home page, the interior pages had content that covering most of the image.
The solution was to create a slideshow that can be launched from any page, any time. Just click View Slideshow, and all the content on the screen slides away, leaving you with pristine images in a well timed slideshow that starts with your current image!
Go check it out at http://www.buzzardsbayregatta.com!
Author’s Note: This is the first post in what we hope to make series: “Ask a Web Strategist”. These are intended to be relatively short, public answers to questions web technology and strategy we receive. Do you have a question? E-mail us!
Question: I’m all bent out of shape about the Flash vs. HTML 5 debate. I’m interested to hear your opinion about it. Will Adobe Flash still have a place on the web in 5 years?
Answer: Generally, trying to predict where any technology in a field susceptible to rapid change will be in 5 years is a losing game. Flash will probably be around for many years to come, but we’d bet on a much smaller place.
Most of our website design projects involve a first design for a new site or web application, or a complete redesign from the ground up. A home page and design “refresh”, however, can be a smart, often overlooked investment in a site’s vibrancy, particularly in times when budgets are tight and that vision of a redesign might be out of reach.
Of course, not all sites are suited to an evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) face lift. Putting lipstick on that 10 year old site with the scrolling marquee, blocky graphics, and green background is probably not a smart investment. But there are many websites with reasonable aesthetics – maybe a few years old – that don’t need to be torn down and rebuilt. Some creative thinking about how existing structural elements can be refined, coupled with a face lift of the home page’s content and, perhaps, key landing pages, can offer real bang for the buck.
Recently, we did just that for the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO).
Since last Wednesday, I’ve been hunkering down at the Hilton Garden Inn in Washington, D.C., leading the web component of Cable Positive’s Youth AIDS Media Institute University (YAMI-U). The purpose of this 7 day program has been to develop and produce a multi-platform social advocacy HIV/AIDS awareness marketing campaign, working with about 20 young adults already active in various HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns.
Over the past week, we developed an overarching campaign theme that individual YAMI-U teams have translated into public service announcements that will be carried nationwide, a series of print ads, an interactive text messaging campaign, and, yes, an engaging and integrated web presence.
Any educator will tell you that the best way to communicate a concept is not just by stating it, but by opening the door for the learner to discover the concept by way of their own experience or reasoning. Science experiments that go on in classrooms across the country are a testament to the importance of knowledge earned through experience, known, in the case of science, as experiments. Learning on the web, often called eLearning, is no different.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a D.C. based think-tank dedicated to advancing educational excellence in U.S. schools, understands this concept as well as anyone. So when they approached us to help them build an interactive study resource and web based game to illustrate some concepts for their “Accountability Illusion” report, we were excited to get started.
