visit catmusic.info

design

The basic design for the site was done by Raffael Rottler of bi.sign Werbeagentur; with some minor adjustments by can design for the non-Flash version of the site.

process

The orinigal Photoshop design was deconstructed piece by piece and then imported into Flash where they were reassembled, given behaviors using ActionScript and animated completely manually frame by frame.

After a time the Flash site became increasingly unsatisfactory; mainly due to slow loading time, inaccessibility to viewers without Flash player and general difficulty in updating. So, the site was recently converted to CSS/HTML/Javascript. The principle for the redesign was one of role separation; the content, style and behavior should all be completely separated.

result

The downside to removing the content from Flash was the loss of automatic “cross-browser” status. However, if you take a look just below the surface you see that this easy “cross-browser” support is actually the opposite. Unless, of course, you think that building the same site two times is a realistic method for achieving wide browser support.

After the redesign the benefit in not accepting “Flash browser support” as cross-browser enough becomes easily recognizable; everyone can now access your content.

Previously, those with Flash unavailable or disabled simply could not access the content. Additionally, people using “pay as you go”, mobile access or dial-up internet services would incur excessive costs and/or waiting time trying to access the Flash content; assuming they had the patience to wait.

Now, the disabled can fully utilize the browsing technology available to them to consume the content in a way that makes sense; a dial-up user who prefers a text-only browser to keep loading times and costs low can access the full range of content, as can the security minded Internet Explorer user with Javascript and Flash intentionally disabled, or the Grandmother who assumes Flash is comic book character; or anyone else.