Once again Nextstudio was called upon for our skill, technical knowledge and love of cricket; this time to implement a swathe of Web 2.0 technologies for Shane Warne’s incarnation in Chinese moulded plastic. Utilising a combination of Flash animation and design from George Patterson Y&R and Nextstudio’s technical direction, Warnie’s debut has been a resounding success.
Sweet as a nut boys, sweet as a nut.
AJAX
Since the site features some nifty animated, talking Warnie action, Nextstudio used AJAX to load content from page-to-page without interrupting the little guy’s banter and dance moves. The only time the King of Spin need be cut-off is when switching from the main site to the SSL-secured checkout section.
Adaptive Degradation
Despite the fancy AJAX conjuring, the website is perfectly accessible for users with screen-readers, older browsers, users without Flash and/or without Javascript. Thanks to it’s standards compliant code, older or screen-reading browsers have an HTML-only fallback provided so that users can find content and order themselves a talking Warnie. Whilst sections of the site are dramatically more interactive and dynamic with the additional technologies enabled, the site is entirely usable even in text-only browsers.
Games & Competitions
Website users, or ‘punters’ as Warnie would affectionately say, can choose from a variety of games to play, with prizes drawn daily.
Ecommerce
As with Boony, the feel of this year’s campaign has been centred around the talking figurines and a variety of retro cricket gear to take to the grounds. Nextstudio built a secure shopping cart mechanism to deal with the validation of unique codes (necessary to obtain Warnie at a discount price). The shop also automatically handles stock levels – removing items from sale when sold out, and has the ability to sell and send ringtones to different handsets in a single transaction.
Hosting & Maintenance
To ensure that the website application could handle a large peak number of requests resulting from heavy promotion during the cricket on TV and radio and also the high bandwidth Flash Video that powers the animated Warnie, Nextstudio have provided a customised, powerful and scalable hosting platform for this project.
The whole website sits on a Debian 64bit Linux-based load balanced solution. PHP and secure traffic run on the robust and industry-leading Apache 2 webserver, whilst the high bandwidth, low processing traffic such as videos and images are handballed to lighttpd, the efficient and speedy webserver that also powers sites like YouTube and Wikipedia.
‘Ring of Fire’ is a card based drinking game that has become legendary among college students, travellers and party goers the world over. The game’s originator recounts “shaking [his] head in amazement” at receiving the first pre-orders via the web from people other than close friends, and from towns and cities where he had no contacts and no other form of marketing.
The Ring of Fire website melds a rich user interface built in Flash with a robust back-end built in PHP. Using the open-source AMFPHP library all content within the site is managed via a custom content management system, allowing the site to be updated at a moment’s notice by its owners, without having to resort to further time spent in web development each time a change is required. This facilitates monthly updates to the content, with new pictures, stories and press-releases posted regularly, and allowing the webmaster to be responsive to feedback from customers. Unlike many websites with a product to sell, Ring of Fire boasts many repeat visitors, and a degree of community interaction with regular submissions hoping to qualify as the site’s “Loser of the Month”.
With the award-winning VB Boonanza campaign of 2005 having been a huge success, Nextstudio was contacted mid-2006 with the task of “bringing Boony online” for his return in Boonanza II, Battle of the Tashes. While most VB drinking, cricket watching Aussie blokes and ladies first brought Boony into their homes via the local bottle shop this time he was destined to be purchased online, or via phone or SMS, and shipped straight to your door.
With nearly double the number of figurines on offer the online store would need to handle a regular stream of customers 24 hours a day, with huge peaks following each Ashes test. Nextstudio liased with the agency behind the promotion (George Patterson Y & R) to implement the user interface based on supplied design guidelines and to connect it to proprietary electronic-commerce and order tracking systems.
The Boonanza II website also featured a membership signup feature, a custom developed image gallery (including administrative moderation of user-submitted content), integration with a singularly unique competition entry system and its own order tracking service.
Nextstudio was called in for our expertise with content management, advanced Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and standards-compliant semantic layouts.
The aim was to provide Ford with a site that not only featured excellent accessibility but also was able to be ‘re skinned’ economically simply by changing the CSS file for the site. This allows Ford to commission a distinctive new franchise site for each of their brands just by redefining a few images, fonts and colours.
Our design partners SuperActionGoTeam were commissioned by popular Australian author John Marsden to provide a cutting edge and appealing website.
Nextstudio were asked to collaborate on integrating a database driven weblog (connecting Flash to the popular Wordpress blog software) and generate dynamic book titles
Another project in conjunction with George Patterson Y & R was the Barry Hall Hall for the Australian Football League. Nextstudio provided the key backend technologies to interact with Flash.
The site features lots of Flash Video, games, member sign-up, login and surveys.
Mavi Eye Textiles is a Melbourne-based small business, importing Turkish textiles and furnishings. Working with our design partners, SuperActionGoTeam, the task was to give this business an online presence and allow the online placement of orders with low ongoing costs. Nextstudio produced a Content Management System designed specifically to maintain the Mavi Eye product catalogue.
While an off-the-shelf shopping cart mechanism was considered, these simply could not provide the precise product selection which was achieved with a custom solution, allowing customers to build their own set of furnishings based on their preference of textile, colour and style combinations.
