A strong and dynamic flash website - with content management
The Brief
The club wanted a new website to help take their brand further online and on the club scene. Something bright, funky and easy to update were their main requirements, and they pretty much gave us free rein to design the look of the website.
The Solution
We first started organising what sort of content would be displayed on the site, and how it was meant to be displayed.
It was decided that the primary purpose of the website would be to showcase previous and upcoming events that Club Karma would be running. Secondary information (like Club Karma's history) was to be put into separate sections - using the same space as events - but would only be accessible from a menu on the left. A newsletter sign-up option was also put here.
We decided to build the website in Flash, and to use Vertigo, a CMS which we had been developing to manage website content. This would enable us to create transistions between content, making it appeal to its media-savvy and fashion-conscious visitors, while being easy to maintain and update.
As a visual and aural addition, we added a iPod inspired streaming MP3 player with track and time display and control buttons. The player will run any MP3 placed into the CMS automatically.
The homepage was designed to show two events that the club were running, or had run. If there were more events to read about the viewer could - jukebox style - flick through the homepage to discover what other events had been run.
Clicking an event on the homepage opens it up, in the same space, and shows any associated information about the event and provides access to details about the location and a photo gallery. As we had designed a simple two-column layout to contain the main content, we added a dynamic feature that meant no matter which side the event was picked from, it would arrange its content accordingly.
All the content for an event, text, directions, photos and more is managed by Vertigo. This can be updated at any time. Vertigo also automatically scales and crop images along with creation of PDFs for printing. The Flash front-end handles the layout and organisation of this data, presenting it in the same way as other existing events.
Having a blank canvas and a free reign on a project provided us with a lot scope to design and create this website. This was also the first live implementation of Vertigo, giving us a chance to see how things worked in real life. We're proud of the result and happy that the client got something above and beyond what they were expecting.