David Emery OnlineFoals!
11 December 2007
As promised I’ve got something show you which has been eating up all my free time for the last few days; behold the lovely new site for Foals:
This time the design isn’t really mine – I guess I art directed to a point, but all the pixels were pushed by James (who I’d link to but he still doesn’t have a site); and lovely pixels they are too. Instead, it fell to me to do the html and back-end work, so I had a bit of fun.
The key bit that is probably the most fun and also the bit that lead to the slightly late nights working on it is the fluidness. The wonderful design that James turned in on first glance didn’t look like it wanted to be fluid, but – quite frankly – that wasn’t going to stop me. I’m particularly proud of the footer section – have a go play around with the window width; all the elements down there are positioned independently based on percentages, so they all move at slightly different speeds.
The other key thing I wanted to highlight was the use of microformats. Normally I either end up doing the design, or both the design and the code but this time as I was only really doing the html I wanted to make sure it was pretty good html. To this end, we’re using the hAtom microformat for both news items and blog posts, and the hCalendar microformat for gig listings. Both of these were really pretty easy to implement, as they only required a little more code then I would have written anyway.
Other fun things are that you can subscribe to the live dates page as an iCal calendar (very easy to put together if you’re using Textpattern, which we are (of course) for the Foals site); we pull in the contents of the Foals flickr group into the site all over the place, which is a simple way of doing easy fan interaction – we also have comments turned on for almost everything, which achieves the same thing (woo for comments!).
Right. On to the next thing…