davidbliss

Building IWC.com

IWC.com and the publishing system powering it are a new cornerstone for IWC's digital strategy. Given the goal that this system remain relevant for a minimum of 10 years (and what can happen on the internet in 10 years) technology choices were particularly important.

How do you future-proof a development like this?

For us, the logical place to start is with technologies that are familiar, flexible and open.

The standards-based front end delivers a variety of beautiful content to the widest range of site visitors. The content itself is managed by IWC's internal team, using a sophisticated and easy to use CMS built with the tremendously flexible Django framework.

via odopod.com

 

Mobile web test suite

Peter-Paul Koch published an excellent article on the smartphone browser landscape back in December of last year. It has a ton of great information including advice on building a mobile QA suite. As Peter-Paul points out in his ALA article and an excellent series of articles on his blog, dominant browsers vary region to region. Here is a test suite I recently distilled given my U.S. centric needs:

Primary Phones:

  • iPhone OS4: running Safari and Opera Mini
  • Doid 2 (OS 2.2): running Webkit, Opera Mobile, and Opera Mini
  • BlackBerry Torch (OS6): running Webkit
  • BlackBerry Curve (pre OS6): running BB Browser

Others, included dependent on region and site statistics:

  • Nokia n95 (S60): running Webkit
  • Samsung (Bada): running Dolfin
  • Palm Pre (webOS): running Webkit
  • Windows Phone 7: running IE7

This suite does include browsers that don't do well with JavaScript (Opera Mini and BB Browser) and phones that use a variety of input devices (touch and non-touch devices as well as hard & soft keyboards). I have not included any of the lowest end browsers (NetFront) because we have not yet worked on a site where significant traffic comes from those devices. For the moment, I'm relying on the powers of progressive enhancement to serve the limited traffic we get from those lowest end devices.

A discussion on Drupal and the future of publishing

I'm a fan of the Big Web Show and while catching up on some recent episodes, this one with Jen Simmons stood out. What resonated with me was the broader conversation about tools for web publishing and how a tool like Expression Engine or Drupal can empower a small team to do a lot in a short time.

I never developed a taste for Drupal, but we've used Expression Engine a great deal at Odopod. Recently we have started using Django for the projects that we used to use EE for. Django gives much of the same efficiencies that EE provides as well as significantly increased flexibility to go build more unique experiences. More on that on the Odopod blog soon.

In the mean time, have a listen to the discussion, I think you will enjoy it.

 

Flash for Mobile Discussion

Sony Internet TV

At Odopod, we embrace both Flash and Web Standards. Recently, Lucas and I led an agency-wide discussion on Flash for mobile devices. Our presentation covered the increasing support of Flash Player 10.1 and Air 2.5 among devises and the need to accommodate small screens and slower processors. The ensueing discussion included how we can best use Flash in the mobile space and how we should modify our process for designing, developing and publishing all of our Flash content.