Belben Wells

Under direction from  Belben Wells we produced a bespoke site designed entirely in flash with optimised code for rapid presentation on slow speed connections. The site looks clean and professional with a high level of finish included animated loading and display features.

The requirement was to display a relatively small number (50-200) high quality images in an interesting way.

Throughout the design process we collaborated with Belben Wells to ensure that the proposed design solution would be well suited to the web technology. Our brief in this project was to add sparkle to the design. This was addressed in a number of key aspects -

• Interactivity
• Speed of operation
• Quality of finish

It was apparent from the outset that Flash was to be the technology of choice for this project.

Images provided were to be compressed carefully, so as to ensure good image quality at the smallest file size.

It was also identified that the folios to be displayed should be easily updated - the titles, choice of photographs should be driven from a configuration file to make the process of updating the images in use quick and simple.

The resultant site has the following key features -

• Kinetic effect pre-loader, when a photograph is requested, while it loads imaginary elastic above and below the display area gradually tightens to increasing resonance. This is rigged to always achieve one bounce. The rate of change in elasticity is proportional to the speed at which the image is traveling down the phone line... This results in a fascinating effect.
• Driven by XML based data - All folios and photograph lists are stored in XML to make the process of image updates/re-ordering simple.
• Fast - try it... the site footprint, excluding the photographs, which are loaded on demand, is around 20K. This means even on a slow connection (say 56K) your looking at a delay of 4 seconds before the site is running. Even when there is a delay, something happens on screen - this way the whole site flows well.

We recently updated this site to include a new folio section, the customer is very happy with the quality of the site - and in particular the quality of the images on screen. We thoroughly enjoyed this production and feel that it reflects well on the quality of photography contained within.