A site for everyone
We’ve been building websites here at MARSWorks Inc. for many years and have faced many challenges. We’ve often struggled to decide whether or not we’d become more of a FLASH shop or stick to our current style which can best be described as “build anything and in any platform”. We’ve always believed in the philosophy of determining the situation our client and the web audience is in, and then determine the best possible tools and technologies to apply to that situation. Often, the choice of a platform or tool like FLASH poses many challenges in making the site truly accessible, or friendly to Search Engines, or people without the ability to download the FLASH plugin.
In the development of our latest website, a long overdue revamp of our corporate online presence at MARSWorks.com we decided to embark on the challenge of building a website that could use the rich and animated features of FLASH, but also be readable to those without FLASH and be fully readable to search engines or other indexing tools.
Although we’re only at the beginning of this process, we have finally managed to make this a reality, and in the process learn a great deal about trying to have the best of both worlds on a site. The site uses a single set of content data to populate both the xHTML and FLASH versions, and we do our best to detect the version of FLASH and then display the site in the proper format for each visitor.
What’s next? We’re next going to work on making sure we have proper support and display for various mobile platforms, including of course the iPhone from Apple and some popular Blackberry versions.
August 14th, 2008 at 4:32 am
Don’t forget Windows Mobile 6!
Really I haven’t seen many websites that work well in a PDA, and that certainly is the future for business people. Actually one great system although not a webpage in itself, is WestJet’s e-ticket - they send it, I open it on my PDA and show it as my boarding pass. Works across the board from inspectors to flight attendants. Very cool, very useable technology - which is kind of vacant I find. There are lots of technologies, but I can pick a handful that are really useful to the average person on a daily basis. Why don’t you make a PDA app for parking that lets the user put in the meter # where they are parked when they arrive - tie it back to an ecomm account that they have either prepaid or do a one-off payment, and the green hornet can verify payment on their PDA. I’m sure there are a couple of things to work out, but an example of how apps can work in daily life for the masses, not just apps for hard-core Internet users.