The Requirement

The Virgin.com site development involved a completely new branding and CMS framework.

The site is revolutionary in the fact that the main front-end of the site is totally driven by Flash and yet all the content is totally driven by CMS editors editing normal HTML pages.

The development was undertaken in partnership with Virgin’s chosen design agency Blast Radius. Blast Radius are a world-renowned agency with offices in many countries. Essentially, their brief from a CMS perspective was that there was no brief! They had a completely free reign on design and innovation.

The Project Challenges:

• To deliver a truly interactive and fun Flash-driven website whilst providing every-day content editors with an interface to update it.
• To deliver a Flash-driven website that has an alternative representation of the Flash site that is truly accessible and does not require duplication of effort to create content.
• To deliver a site capable of servicing in excess of 250 million users a year from two web servers with minimal load.
• To provide sophisticated statistical analysis of user interaction with the site across both Flash and HTML versions.
• To provide a bespoke framework for managing advertising across the site globally and at product/company level.
• To provide a framework for managing news across the site globally and at product/company level.

The Solution

The base concept for the site was to create a set of XHTML templates that could render for an accessible version, whilst at the same time using the Contensis Open API to deliver an XML version of content that could be consumed by the flash.

Use of the advanced placeholders enabled us to rigidly restrict types of content, length of content and images sizes to ensure that the content would work well when delivered into the Flash environment.

In order to deliver XML successfully to the Flash, a schema had to be agreed between Blast Radius and Contensis. Once this was agreed the Contensis development team were able to use the Open API to generate the precise XML required to power the site.

In order to reduce load on the server we incorporated advanced caching technology developed by the Contensis team to ensure that there is no database connectivity required in the production environment. This technology also increased the performance of the site 10-fold over normal caching methods.

Contensis are a partner of Webtrends and were able to utilise our internal Webtrends specialists to implement a sophisticated statistics set-up that incorporated both the Flash and HTML. This incorporated an advanced statistics logging script and many bespoke reports to pull out specific metrics that Virgin were interested in seeing.

Due to the complication of the Flash/HTML integration, as well as a set of very unusual specific requirements it was necessary to develop a bespoke framework for managing banners across Virgin.com. The Contensis professional services team leveraged the template engine to create a set of sub templates that could quite literally be dragged into any template that required banners. These templates were created to automatically attach the correct logging scripts necessary for Webtrends based upon the type of content the banner resided in and specific metadata elements assigned.

Having already delivered the global extranet for Virgin - “The Village” - it was necessary to incorporate news across both systems. This ensured that through a single source of input, multiple systems could utilise the data, reducing the effort in publishing a news article. All of the news is searchable and can be searched based upon keyword, date range, related products, etc.

Throughout the whole project a key concern was accessibility and search engine optimisation. At template-build stage extensive testing was carried out on all templates to ensure they met WAI AAA standards. In addition, all elements of the HTML version that used JavaScript were developed so that they downgraded when JavaScript was disabled. As an example, the drop-down menu used to select a region is actually an unordered list.