Busy times at Bluelime Media
Things have been very busy at Bluelime Media, which would explain the lack of posting during September. I can’t believe September ended last week! How did that happen?
We’re currently working with UBC Library on the UBC Vault website. Phase 1 has been launched but much more is yet to come. Working with Johnny from Avenue Creative has been delightful. His design skills simply blow me away.
Tzaddi is working on a huge WordPress project which we hope we can show you soon. Just a few weeks ago we launched the Shelley Morris Business Services website. We’re very pleased with the website. Tzaddi did a great job on the design and, as always, Louise‘s content is a delight to read.
As for me, I haven’t been simply sitting on the couch. I’ve been busy working on my most challenging project yet. Following a year off, the girls from Scenario Design, Isabelle and Margarita, have launched a new company called Leapzone Strategies. Leapzone provides business and brand coaching. Being graphic designers, the girls had a particular look in mind. Isabelle designed every page in Photoshop and I simply had to make it work. I was challenged by the various design elements such as the in-page scrollbars and the flash navigation, and the requirement for the whole site to be maintainable by Isabelle and Margarita.
I can already hear the usability and SEO experts out there. “Ack, scrollbar, flash navigation, are you insane…” As a web designer I had to make decisions on how to best develop this website with the required design elements. I’ve argued in the past with graphic designers about the use of scrollbars and I’ve yet to win an argument. Sometimes certain project simply need elements which go against web standards and usability, but in this instance I felt like the reasons were justifiable and the scrollbars do work. The content isn’t too long and so doesn’t require too much scrolling.
Search engine optimization will most likely be affected by the flash navigation, but the blog should counteract that effect by providing lots of content. Only time will tell.
Overall I think that the site looks very good. Fitting this design into table-less HTML was a huge challenge, but visually the site is stunning. The girls tell me also that the back-end, which I custom-built using PHP and MySQL, works very well and is easy to use. I hope to see this company evolve and become incredibly successful in the same way Scenario Design did.