Jackie Gillies + Associates carry out building conservation and creative re-use of historic buildings to the highest possible professional standards as well as promoting awareness of building conservation.

When the guys from Fluid introduced us to their vision of their website, we basically had two options on how to realise it:

Flash or Javascript?

After a few internal discussions, in where we evaluated the pros and cons of both technologies we came to the decision to avoid Flash and make use of the powerful jQuery framework.

The following things lead us to this decision:

• Accessibility
• Search engine friendliness

The tricky bit came after this.

Lots of websites (in fact, I could’nt find a single one that was not) that are using scrolling effects like this, have the whole page content on one page. This is from a search engine friendly point of view as well as for the loading time very bad.

So we had to find a way of loading the inside pages “on request”. Therefore we used the jQuery Ajax wrapper which loads and inserts the content when a page is requested.

Another interesting part was to get “The Work” section populated by certain categories of their Blog.

Therefore we used the RSS reader plugin of JOJO which is based on the magpie rss parser library.

What we delivered was the following:

• A Blog for them to write about their daily work based on WordPress.
• A content manageable Website based on JoJo CMS, fetching content from the blog using RSS Feeds.
• A funky animated Javascript interface that is still absolutely usable without Javascript enabled. This makes it search engine friendly and allows the usage of screen readers etc.

What do you think?

If you think you could do with some hands on lessons Bevan is a great coach and you can find him out at Jacks Point, pehaps try checking out the site first for a few tips before you go out that way.