Blenderdeval
The second generation of the site for Blender, a Spanish maker of vending machine products. They asked for a site built entirely in Flash; I built a hybrid instead.
Two years in, the site was thrown away and built again, and this one was less a technical decision than an argument with the brief.
How it started
Blender came back wanting more. More design, more movement, animations, a site that did something when you looked at it rather than sitting still. The first version had put them on the web and taken orders, and now they wanted it to look like the web of the moment.
To show me what they meant they sent a reference: a site built entirely in Flash. The whole thing inside the plugin, one animated piece from the first frame to the last.
I thought Flash was already on the way out. It was 2011: the iPhone had never run it and was not going to, Apple had said so in public the year before, and Adobe would stop developing it for mobile browsers before the year was over. Beyond the phones, a site living inside the plugin had no addresses worth linking to, no back button that behaved, and very little a search engine could read.
So I did not build the site they had sent me. I proposed a hybrid instead, and built that.
A hybrid, not a Flash site
Flash stayed, but only where it earned its place, which turned out to be two files: an animated presentation and the background music. Everything else was ordinary web.
The structure, the content and the catalogue were HTML and CSS. jQuery and a set of plugins did the work Flash would otherwise have been asked to do: a cycling slideshow on the home page, a lightbox and a gallery for the product images, and jQuery UI for the effects. Forms went over Ajax, so the parts that had to load without leaving the page did exactly that, and that is where most of the movement the client was really asking for actually came from.
It was thoroughly of its year. Hovering a menu item played a sound, and a theme played in the background while you browsed. It shipped in Spanish, English and French, because the company sold beyond Spain.
That split is why the site kept working while Flash stopped: the pages were still pages. They had URLs, a crawler could read them, and on a phone the site lost its presentation and its music rather than turning into a blank rectangle.
What changed was the front end. The CMS I had written in 2009 stayed where it was, running the catalogue and the orders behind the new skin, and it would keep running for years.
Next generation
In 2014 the site was rebuilt one last time onto Drupal, which is where the custom CMS of 2009 finally came out and the last of the Flash went with it.