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How did the project start?
The project began as a requirement to advertise and increase market awareness for a major UK hard style, themed dance night. For this the client required an innovative, highly custom flash website to effectively convey their brand and assist in building audience awareness for a series of nights, to be held in the North's only super club; 'Tall Trees'. We worked very closely with the client to ensure that the site portrayed the right message and would be a representative 'experience' for its users, and be able to compete with well established and very highly funded European competition.
What options did you consider?
The client had a fairly clear vision of how they wanted to the site to feel, and how they wanted the user to experience the journey through it. So we worked closely with them through various designs to develop a site which fit their requirements whilst still being easy to navigate and effectively conveying the important information about the nights.
What help and expertise did you receive?
We received guidance from website owner, with concept art that they wished implemented into the website, otherwise it was a very self driven development process, and twisted studio had a clear vision of what the client wanted and adhered to this.
Did you face and challenges or learn any lessons?
There were two main challenges encountered during the development of the project. Firstly was the problem of dealing with 2 people with competing visions on design and where to find the best compromises.
Secondly was the requirement of the client to have many aspects of a very graphical website be fully dynamic and updateable by the client, following the completion of the website. This was to include aspects such as the addition of new story segments, new DJ selection screens, and new DJ profiles. Designing this in such a way as to be usable by the client whilst maintaining the grand vision was a substantial challenge.
We also began development of the site in the flash IDE but this quickly became unmanageable due to some of these features, so we opted to completely rebuild the site in FLEX which proved to be a wise decision and all websites we now create are built exclusively using FLEX with Flash only being used to create the base resources.
What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?
The night was an astounding success, and talking to the end users was a valuable and often rare experience. Many of the attendees for the first night had visited the website and universally had a positive experience, likening it in impact and quality to our client's primary competition. This alone would have convinced some users that it was worthwhile travelling in many cases very long distances to attend the night, as it portrayed the night to be as big and unique experience as those they would have attended in Holland or Germany.
As regards our business practices it has improved our website development methodology and improved our web portfolio, which has aided us in securing further web projects.
What are your plans for the future?
We plan to move forward with our web development services, employing some of the lessons learned from developing the Advokate website and already have 3 new reputable web projects pending.
