Doing a large corporate website the interesting way
Today we launched a new website for one of the major Danish mortgage provider, Totalkredit. They are known by all Danes due to their tv-ads (produced by TBWA\Copenhagen), that everyone either hates or loves. This is a very big client, and thus they require a very big website. But as they are for the people and tries to communicate directly with the common man, the website need not be corporate, but must be rich with content, easy to use and with many features that will create returning visitors.
Well, all this I did not have much to do with, that concerns the concept department. But concretising, technically verifying and realizing this concept is very much my job. The project has taken many months but it is now finally complete. Or well, such is never complete, but the first version has been launched at least. And this site is (technically) amazing if I should describe it. The amount of JavaScript used is huge and much of it uses MochiKit heavily. The JavaScript is used to enliven the page in a very interesting way.
The whole page works without JavaScript in the classical fashion (clicking links, reloading the whole page with the new page), but with JavaScript enabled, all links are caught and handle via Ajax instead. This technique was introduced to me by Jeremy Keith and his somewhat cute term Hijax. In order to do this, but not combine markup with content, large portions of the HTML (very large in fact) are built in JavaScript. For this need MochiKit.DOM is really handy.
Other features of the site, that makes this a very satisfying job to have completed:
- It is of course search engine optimized (Hijax preserves this)
- It uses a very concise, readable markup and works as mentioned without JavaScript (the properties of Progressive Enhancement)
- The URL is modified on every major page change using fragments in order to allow deep-linking and bookmarking (this is partly self-developed, partly borrowed from SWFAddress)
- And given the above, that “back” and “forward” buttons of the browser works (unlike many other full-Ajax websites)
- The site includes Google Maps (you can’t go wrong with that!)
- The site is tested and optimized for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 as well as Firefox 2 (and friends).
Enough talking, here is the site: http://www.totalkredit.dk – “unfortunately” most of the site is in Danish except for a small investor-part.
