Creative Arm: Project El Salvador (Web Design)

Pleasing Design

The first thing most people notice is that this website layout has a notably pleasing design, it appeals to the eye with vivid well placed splashes of colour framed by smoothe subtle base palette on an effervescent white background - lively and entertaining while underpinning official function of a government gateway.

Interactive experiences

There is an abundance of content which finds its own place on the page, drawing the viewer to a sensory experience, from the framed work of Photographers Miguel Servellón and Rodolfo Villeda to the music player, to the changing Salvadorean landscape banner, there is much to explore and experience.

Massive content base

With over 50 pages, of articles in the embassy website of advice, information, and official data on El Salvador, the United Kingdom and Ireland you could be forgiven for thinking you have stumbled onto a tourism website for any of the three countries involved, however the heart of the site contains all the consular forms and information needed for running a modern foreign mission.

Dual languages

Every item of content on the website exists in two languages, English, and Spanish, the content is translated in-house from seed content in either language.

Embracing 2.0

The embassy website is taking advantage of web 2.0 technologies such as "Twitter" The Embassy website publishes an English and Spanish feed, this enables embassy staff to communicate important announcements and updates across all levels, not just when the target audience finds time to check, but instantly pushes information out there to be seen at once. The website also contains much multi-media content.

Ajax

The site is run on custom Ajax framework, this means that, unlike traditional websites, which cause the whole website to load each time content is changed, the Embassy website will gather the content in the background and only replace the part of the page that has changed, doing this saves countless seconds and megabytes, and unlike most implementations of ajax, it gets it right, it does not interfere with the operation of the back and forward buttons and also enables the current state of the page to be bookmarked. Users who turn off javascript will notice that the website runs perfectly well without it, as ajax is a feat few Ajax enabled applications have mastered.

Robust and flexibly Accessible.

This website was painstakingly designed to appear as perfect in every viewing situation as possible, and considering that it achieves this, through not only using the same content files, but by using an unforked codebase. The website is viewable on any browser, from the largest resolution projector screens to the smallest phone browsers, while remaining in proportion and without needing horizontal scroll bars through a 100% liquid layout - avoiding clumsy javascript presentational layout hacks which can tend to fail when used on non-javascript enabled browsers - the website can be resized in real time - any time and keep the same proportions. There is also an option to show and hide the context images as well as other menus and objects, for those hard of sight there is text resizing controls which work with or without javascript.

Browers fully supported are Internet Explorer 7, and 8, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, the website also gracefully degrades in internet explorer 6.

Scalable Architecture

With more and more users accessing the website, The architecture of the website is built to embrace a CDN (Content Delivery Network), when the time comes that the website needs to be split up over multiple locations for speed and stability, the task will be almost effortless because the architecture has been underpinned for CDN from a seminal stage.

Best coding practices

Valid XHTML and CSS and strict PHP practices were used, all code is marked up, this will future proof the website as well as protect it from security vulnerabilities and crashes.

SEO in mind

The decision to optimise the website to be indexed freely by the leading search engines was not an after thought, it is built into the architecture of the website, from the choice of domain names, the hierarchy of pages, the "friendly urls" down to the dynamically generated meta information for titles, keywords, and wording in the content. The website was designed to accommodate search engines from the ground up.

Bandwith management

Active caching, expiry headers, and intelligent asset naming are all part of the larger strategy for managing bandwidth resources, thus delivering a faster, more durable user experiences.

Future compatibility

Most websites need a complete re-design within a few years of being initially launched, however by using the best design and coding practices, the embassy website will not need a re-design for many years to come.