TACODA®
The best in online presence for an online company
TACODA is an online advertising broker based in New York, specializing in placements on large media properties. Among the most visible of these is Advance Internet, which provides the content management systems for the daily newspapers in Cleveland, New Orleans, Portland, and other markets.
When it came time for them to roll out their new "Audience Segments" platform, they approached Format to design and implement a new site to replace their bubble-era presence. I was asked to produce templates, stylesheets, and a sidebar-item publishing widget around composites created by Chris Geiser.
Working through a lack of education
Our first and greatest challenge was that our end client report was, until handoff, a non-technical user with emphasis on the non.
This class of decisionmaker forces - by its very attachment to any high-profile project - the addition of several steps and rounds of revision to the site development process.
The focus of energy in communicating with such reports is in finding ways to simplify or push aside the details that impact the budget for technical reasons; things like browser limitations and the HTTP transaction model require high investment in billable labor that can be hard to justify to a report who remains unaware of the underpinnings of a given technology.
Such managers see the entire Web through the prism of the browser, and often fail to see that even at the user-facing level a successful site relies on a number of different technologies, all of which must work together well, or not at all.
Unfortunately and through no fault of their own, Format's representatives were forced to use the firefighting approach. However, because they were able to channel client concerns into the presentation layer of the project, the goal of preserving standards-friendliness was never threatened.
Cool and hip image, cool and hip widgets
The end client was intent on pitching their platform as effective in reaching the best markets. As a result, I was given the opportunity to touch several platforms I hadn’t in the past.
SlideshowPro Director
The slides on the homepage are served via SlideshowPro Director, which I found difficult to configure (mostly because of database compatibility problems).
If required to work with SSP again I would proceed without hesitation, but given an alternative I would use code from my own JavaScript library in a heartbeat.
Flash video
This went off without a hitch. In tandem with SWFObject, implementing the client's video demo was a straightforward process.
Print-specific stylesheets
Most of the jobs I've done have neglected, and in some cases outright denied, composition of a thoughtfully-designed print presentation.
One of the fires put out was the client report's misguided intent that the printed pages of the site look exactly like the pages laid out for screen display; after some discussion, we were asked to create - on short notice - a printing solution that would be well-suited to its medium.
Technical accomplishments
I did not set out with any specific goals at the start of this project, except to bring it in while keeping to my usual standards of excellence and consistency. In the course of my work, there were several elements that found their way into the production site, and I'm quite proud of a couple of them.
Single site template
Despite the breadth of content and user goals I needed to address, the requirements of the layout remained simple enough that I was able to design a single template for all of the pages on the site. Each layout is given a specific class - .alternateAlpha through .alternateZeta - which allows an arbitrary layout to be assigned to any page.
Through the use of CSS display attributes and the use of boolean variables in the server-side template scripting, the appearance of any given page is highly customizable while remaining accessible even to low-skill-level maintainers.
Single site-wide multilevel navigation
Site navigation is served in a single file, and its layout is controlled through heavy leverage of context flagging via CSS selectors, relative positioning, and negative margins.
Breadcrumb trails
The breadcrumb trails present at the top of each page are handled in screen media by DOM functions, while for the print pages they are handled through some fairly hairy PHP pattern matching (as a direct result of the fact that the print stylesheet inadvertently became an afterthought).
Sidebar content management
In the space of ten billable hours I was able - with help - to create, test, and debug from scratch an application that made possible the creation of sidebar content items and press release links, all without requiring any more maintainer knowledge of markup than the three paragraphs of guidelines provided in the maintainer documentation.