Welcome to the first post of our REVEALED series. These posts are designed to give you an insider run-down of the process (and stress/energy drinks/shouting) we went through to create some of our best work. First up is the website for Bristol-based freelance film director Simon Pearce.
The Client
Simon Pearce is a young and upcoming short and feature—length director based in Bristol. His debut feature ‘SHANK’ has been released on DVD after being screened in over 60 film festivals around the world. He needed an internet presence where his fans could find him and he could share his latest projects and ventures through a blog. We met up with him and talked through his requirements in more detail, discussing what he needed to have on each page. It was clear that he wanted a clean, light and easy-to-use website that he could use to professionally present himself.
After making it look the nuts and signing off the design, it was time to get developing…
WordPress for the WIN
For Simon’s site we decided to do something we hadn’t done previously and use the well-known blogging platform WordPress. We see so many sites out there that are powered by it, and decided that it was time Digital Gangsta had some of the action! After reading about the loop and basic templating documentation it was time to get started. And, HOT DAMN, how we were impressed.
As we mentioned briefly in our last post, WordPress can scale. While most widely known as a blogging platform, there are nearly 10,000 plugins to make it do whatever you want! We’ve used a couple of these for Si’s site, and had absolutely no problems installing or configuring. When we were developing the site it felt like WordPress was made for developers. Then we handed it over to Simon and it felt like it was made for the client. We’d unconvered the success secret to WordPress – it’s bloody good. Go WP!
Since then we’ve moved our very own Digital Gangsta site over to WP and are using it to develop a larger project. It still continues to impress us. Thoroughly recommended.
To Flash or not to Flash?
When wearing a trench coat and dodgey glasses in a busy public area, definitely not to… but to add a ’flash’ of magic to a website??
We used a hint of Flash on Simon’s site to provide the cool-looking navigation menu at the top of the page. The use of Flash is discussed all over the place, with some loving its use, and an equal amount against it. Our opinion is that flash is good! and it allows things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible (like ninja cat videos on flash-powered youtube), but it must be used tastefully and respectfully.
One of the major issues with the use of flash is that search engines struggle to index its content. While this isn’t strictly true (and many still believe Google can’t ‘see’ Flash what-so-ever) as the major search engines are ever increasing their ability to make sense of SWF and other flash files. However, it’s usually still not as efficient as good old-skool mark up and Flash certainly falls victim to some navigation and linking issues. To ensure Simon’s site was as easy for search engines to navigate as humans we included discrete HTML footer links which are also handy if the user happened to scroll all the way down to the bottom of a long page.
What do YOU think?
So while Simon loves his site, as do we (but we have to as it is now one of our babies), we don’t want to become blinded by love and would really appreciate any thoughts or feedback you might have regarding www.simon-pearce.co.uk. So head on over and check it out, Simon really has some good stuff that has earned him several awards as an upcoming young director.
