Beautiful design, robust technology
Posted in Design, Tech/Development on: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 by Paul Boag
Temporary websites are often the most tricky to build. Their transitory nature and short bursts of high traffic can be extremely demanding on both designer and developer.
Headscape recently launched the Big Butterfly Count in association with M&S and Butterfly Conservation.
I always think campaign sites like this are tricky to design and build. They are short lived and so don’t justify the longer process of a permanent website. However they can also attract large numbers of visitors in a short length of time. This means there is no opportunity to refine and your backend code needs to be rock solid to deal with the load.
With the Big Butterfly Count featuring heavily on TV, radio, newspapers and on news sites like the BBC, it was important we got it right first time.
In the video below, I walk you through the site and show you why I am so proud of our team.
If you want to learn more about Ed Merritt the designer you can follow him on Twitter or visit his website.
To learn more about Craig Rowe the developer, check out his blog or follow him on Twitter.
14 Comments
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Any way we can download these videos you post?
Yeah, I’m having problems viewing the video as well. It won’t load.
Loaded now :)
Ok, so what’s the secret to getting the video to load then? I’ve had trouble with this particular player before and I don’t know if I’ve ever figured out why it won’t load for me…
Wait, is the secret just commenting on the blog post and THEN it’ll load? Because that’s just what happened to me, and it sounds like it’s what happened to Frederik. Tricky, Mr. Boag! :)
Oh, and spectacular project! Nice job, Headscape!
It seems Craig’s own website may not be coping with the load, getting a 500 Server Error ;)
The butterfly website is impressive though. Good example of animation and JS effects adding a lot to the usability.
That’s the problem with sharing your box with 2 other dev’s.. they mess with the box too much and make breaking changes to the config! Site should be back now. I’ll write a mini butterfly post a bit later.
love it, this is really impressive!
it would be great to hear some insight from Craig and the team about how the back-end works, nothing too sensitive, but would be interesting to find out to what extent this is CMS driven etc, especially for a short timescale site. In my experience short term sites (eg. conference microsites etc.) tend to get the CMS taken off the spec as it’s ‘too much work’ for the short time it’s live (I know that’s another argument lol).
I don’t know about that, really. Temporary is kind of annoying. I want a site that will be around for a long time, like Dubli. It’s not just a shot in the wind that will disappear after months or weeks – it’s THERE.
Sometimes a temporary site is all you need. Especially in this case as Butterflies come and go with the seasons. They aren’t always there lol
Really nice design and workings, love it.
A simple idea which could’ve been really complex to use, but you guys did a top job of keeping it simple and fun. Nice one!
what’s the url to watch the video on vzaar’s site?
Why video loading doesn’t ends and I couldn’t start it. It would be better if you would upload it at youtube. anyway if you want some video tutorial on graphic design then you can visit GFXBD.