Agency site pushes technical boundaries

When big name digital agency RED Interactive redesigned its site, its goal was, "to give the audience a better sense of who we are as a company," explains developer Richard Herrera. "And a big part of who we are revolves around what we are doing on the technology side."

Dominated by bright and colourful photography and with some fun transitions and animations to brighten the visitor's journey, the responsive site was built using CSS3, HTML5 and jQuery. "We made extensive use of the History API for state management and tried to make sure every crevasse of our site was accessible via hard link," adds Herrera.

3D capable

RED also pushed the boundaries in 3D-capable browsers. "We use our unique un-lightbox filtering effect to play with 3D space, pushing filtered items back into z-space and allowing the user to focus on what they’re actually searching for," Herrera adds.

"This grid effect is all handled via a custom JavaScript engine and our Rosy inheritance framework."

With all that functionality, it’s easy to leave the site a little sluggish and bloated, but RED had that covered too. "We took great care in optimising load times," says Herrera. "We used the usual compression and concatenation tactics and made sure to optimise communication with our server-side.

"Rather than returning raw HTML, XHR requests return JSON objects of associated page metadata. This lean request allows us to serve pages faster than the average server-side reload."

This showcase was originally published in .net magazine issue 236.

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