Status: Retired
Site templating and build
Allied Domecq are suppliers of products such as Tia-Maria, Kahlua, Stolichnaya, Courvoisier, Malibu, Perrier Jouët , Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin Robbins. As such a large corporation, their web presence is of great importance to them. Unfortunately their existing site was extremely dated, but in the spirit of the company they embraced the bold designs created by the extremely talent designers at Wheel.
The new site is a testament to what can be acheived using CSS for layouts. Based on the MCMS system, the site pushes the boundaries of both CSS and cross browser awareness and to be honest there's some fairly funky back end stuff going on there as well.
Of particular note is the use of cross browser PNG opacity to implement some of the more challenging areas of the designs. And the particularly clever Flash underlay on the homepage.
Due to the complexity of the build, the entire site was created as flat XHTML and then migrated into the C# environment of MCMS.
To say I'm proud of this one would be an understatement. Great design, leading edge implementation and some tricks that as far as I can find just haven't been done before.
Just thought to let you all know that the new Allied Domecq site is one of the finest examples of accessible websites I have ever seen. Have been browsing the site in Lynx for a while now - they have done an absolutely excellent job from all points of view: navigation, content, functionality. The mark-up is so well semantically structured that JAWS and other assistive technologies (as well as humans, I should add) have no problems in understanding the document structure and meaning. A project to your credit.