Read About
This Site
Here at slingshot we believe in doing things properly. That's why we've developed three websites for your enjoyment! The first is an animated website featuring the latest flash techniques, the second is an html site that complies to high levels of W3C standards, including accessibility and the third is a mini website specially build for mobile devices.
We've put a lot of time and effort into creating our website and thought it may be interesting to explain how and why we did it.
Why We Have Three Sites
We wanted our website to demonstrate as many of our skills as possible and be visible to the widest possible audience. Our three sites are: The Land of Slingshot, our animated site, a normal html website that complies to the highest web standards and a mobile phone mini site.
Our Animated Website
We love animated web sites and really wanted to build one. To do that we needed to use Adobe/Macromedia Flash the most popular web animation tool out there. From a design point of view, there are many reasons why flash sites are great. Designers particularly like it because they can use any font, create any layout and ensure that they're design will look exactly the same on all computers and browsers. Flash also offers the ability to create animations which is hard to achieve in any other way.
Graphics
Our animated site consists of around 300 individual graphics and nearly 5000 frames of animation. The ground and hills of our landscape are made entirely from our logo symbol and any buildings you see are either landmarks of Birmingham or places of interest to us. The people you see walking around or performing stunts are actually us. To make mini versions of ourselves, we filmed each other on a camcorder, extracted the required frames and traced over them to create stylised vector graphics.
Flash Programming (ActionScript)
As well as having a lot of animation in the flash version of our site, there's also a great deal of programming (known as Actionscript). For example, we wanted to be able to update our portfolio and news sections without having to edit any code or animation. To acheive this the animation retreives data from our content management system. This has two major advantages: the site only grabs data and images when they're needed so it's quick to load and we can add information to the site very easily.
Content Management System
We've spent years developing a content management system which we incorporate into most of our websites. For our site, the system controls our portfolio and news sections and enables us to update all three of our websites in one go. We can login to the system from any computer with an internet connection and update text and images extremely quickly. Our system, processes images and creates thumbnails on the fly.
HTML Land
So if the animated Land of Slingshot is so good why have you created a second one? Simple, because we want to make our website as easy to use as possible for all visitors! Our HTML site is designed to be easy to navigate, completely accessible and quick and easy to find the information you are looking for.
The Problem With Flash
There are several big problems about building a site in flash. For one, they have a limited audience and as well as requiring the presence of the correct software, they can be impossible or extremely hard for people with disabilities to use. They rarely pass W3C accessibility tests. Another problem is that flash sites contain very little (if any) searchable text that is required by search engines. This therefore results in poor search engine rankings.
Navigation
Our site has a simple to use navigation across the very top of the site. It is immediately visible on every page, looking around to find it and works in all browsers!
You can also navigate using our hotlinks system:
- http://www.slingshot.co.uk/portfolio - View our portfolio
- http://www.slingshot.co.uk/services - View our services
- http://www.slingshot.co.uk/news - View our latest news
- http://www.slingshot.co.uk/aboutus - All about Slingshot
- http://www.slingshot.co.uk/contact - Get in contact with Slingshot
- http://www.slingshot.co.uk/accessibility - View information on website accessibility
- http://www.slingshot.co.uk/sitemap - View our site map
- http://www.slingshot.co.uk/terms - View our site terms and conditions
Accessibility
We have designed our non-animated website with accessibility for all in mind. What do we mean by this? Well our site meets The World Wide Web Consortiums (W3C) accessibility checkpoint to AAA level - meaning it surpasses the highest standards for accessibility.
Visually impaired users are able to use screen readers to view this site easily and get to the information they require. Our site uses best practice Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) techniques use to ensure that text only browsers are able to view the site.
Why don't we offer a text only alternative? W3C States ~
Our entire site is accessible to level AAA and so we do not need to provide an alternative. Even by W3C's standards text alternatives are a last resort!
But you have a big flash banner - hows is this accessible? Yes we know we have flash on our html version. However if you disable flash then you will only see an image. If you are only using a screen reader then only a description of the image is shown.
We have written a news article on exactly why you should consider making sure your website is accessible and you can read our accessibility report here or contact us for information on how we can help you.
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