Customer: Experience in Motion

Old Site

Here is the old Experience in Motion main landing page:

Generally, the site was uninspiring and difficult to get around and find the information you were looking for.

New Site

This is the new Experience in Motion main landing page:

Immediately, you can see if has a much cleaner look to it. Critical information is on the main page, and navigation to other content has been pared to essential pages. Response is much snappier, due to the minimal use of optimized images and better overall design.

Design Considerations

Given that many of EiM's clients have limited computer experience, and may not even have an internet connection at home, ease of use and a light network footprint were essential considerations in the new site design.

The new site features brief video presentations by EiM counsellers, which, of course, communicate the consultative, personal service nature of the organization to its consituents. The videos are played by a Flash player built for the site. The video content is optimized for fast streaming and load times.

A key criteria for EiM was that administration of the website needed to be very simple. While the structure of the site would change infrequently, certain content was changing continuously. Given that EiM does not have a webmaster, an end-user would be updating the content.

With this in mind, several pages (see Testimonials and Partners) are rendered using server-side XML transformations. What's really cool about the XML transformation is that formatting is managed entirely by the transformation process referencing a cascading style sheet (CSS). The end user modifies the content in an XML file using a text editor, and uploads the updated file via FTP. Training took less than 15 minutes and changes typically take just minutes. The end-user can also make small changes directly to the HTML on other pages using an HTML editor when required.

To maximize flexibility and minimize maintenance, the EiM website is driven from XHTML and PHP templates and cascading style sheets.