BBC Online
Randommedia designed and built a new 6-part online serial called Taggerz, using Flash; a high profile and ground-breaking project for the BBC. Part of the project involved the creation of a microsite to become part of the 1Extra section on BBCi. The microsite had to be built to the BBC's exacting standards for web production, and Randommedia asked us to take on the coding since that's our speciality and time was growing short. We were excited to join the project, and were able to turn around the minisite production in the very tight timescales required.
Since they have so much content, the BBC recognised earlier than many other organisations that content had to be built to standard templates and coding practices, including web accessibility considerations. Otherwise, even with the powerful content management system that drives their sites, things would become uncontrollable and the value of the content would be compromised.
Because of our background in working with web standards, we had much less trouble adapting to the BBC guidelines than developers who are not used to working to anything other than browser quirks. Even for us, it was a new experience working to such tighly formalised requirements.
Aside from the rigorous technical requirements, the other complicating factor was the fact that the template navigation and other elements were dynamically inserted by the content management system. This meant that display rendering problems could occur on the live site that didn't show up in the development environment, and required us to do far more testing than would otherwise be necessary.
The site launched on schedule, and has been well received by the audience.
