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The STC
Give us some background on some of the members of your team and the company that you work for.
Yello Studio is a full service creative agency based in Exeter, Devon. Yello Studio has grown from strength to strength and now includes a small team of talented designers, skilled technicians and creative thinkers – all linked by a love of great design…and cake.
Tell us about the site. What vision were you trying to fill for the client?
The STC is a unique and independent solution capturing the essence of adventure and the appeal of global travel, delivered through the wealth of experience offered by The Specialist Travel Consultancy. We wanted to create a site which was easy to use and very visually appealing to captivate and excite people about their trips. We went to an enormous effort along with the client to ensure every page was completely tailored to the destination including all text/images, maps and background images such as http://www.thestc.co.uk/destinations/countries/antarctica-polar-cruises, even down to the school specific pages http://www.thestc.co.uk/school-trips/info/trip-types. No image was used without a great deal of thought and editing.
With the destinations page http://www.thestc.co.uk/destinations we wanted live “on change” events so it would automatically update the results based on their selection. You will also notice there is no pagination on this page either as we utilised “scroll to” events to load more content on the fly, a bit like twitter. All these little extras we feel make the site even quicker and easier to use, even down to the cool little destination finder on the homepage that enables users to get interactive with the site straight away: http://www.thestc.co.uk/
Was there a specific reason why EE was chosen for this project? Why?
The versatility of EE2 channels allows us to give the client full access without compromising the design in anyway. There is also a great selection of professional bolt ons available to help with the more common tasks.
What add-ons were used? and why?
We used the Matrix fieldtype for the destination finder. Using simple switches to allow the client which entries should be shown on the search boxes.
The image resizer plugin (http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/ed-imageresizer/) was put to good use throughout the site to scale the same image for use on different pages in different situations whilst maintaining a single upload field.
We used a lot of jQuery to pull of the search page using AJAX. http://www.thestc.co.uk/destinations all specifically tailored to the individual groups the STC specialise with.
For the blogging tools we used Channel Images, Channel Videos and Tagger from DevDemon
What difficulties did you encounter? How did you address them? Was there a particular add-on that got you out of a bind?
We used the {exp:query} tag a great deal to draw results from the database based on the way the matrix fieldtype was storing information. Some of the trickier bits, believe it or not was the figuring out the best way to use expression engine to relate entries and categories without printing blank HTML if results did not exist.
Company: yello studio
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