Seventyeight Digital has Two Sites Chosen for Top Kentico Mobile Site of the year for 2011

Jan. 12, 2012 - PRLog -- Seventyeight Digital is happy to announce that is has had two sites chosen in the Kentico Awards for 2011 in the Mobile category. Utilizing Mobile Proxy, a product of 78digital, helped to drastically reduce the development time of the site.

Voting can be conducted for the Kentico 2011 awards at the URL below:

http://www.kentico.com/Customers/Site-of-the-Year/Site-of-the-Year-2011/Vote-for-the-Winners

About the Immortals Mobile Site

Alliance Films, Canada’s leading motion picture distributor, approached Seventyeight Digital to develop a gaming and contest engine in support of their upcoming film release of Immortals. Wanting to reach a wide audience while providing a modern and unique take on the digital marketing of the film we settled on a mobile activation. The Mobile Web Application needed to provide information about Immortals in a format optimized for mobile devices and additionally support an 11 day countdown style contest where new questions, pertaining to the film, are presented each day making the players eligible for contest prizes. The application needed to be constructed in a relatively short period of time (3 weeks), be accessible on a wide variety of mobile devices, and contain feature and media rich content, be true to the branding and visual aesthetic of the movie, and provide incentives to visitors for repeat views.

Merely providing a different style sheet for mobile devices was not enough. Optimization of the weight of pages, the type of content to display and a complete rethinking of the IA were deemed necessary for success. Because of this, a front end jQuery based mobile framework called jQTouch was used for the front end. This provides mobile UI elements and behaviors such as animated page transitions common in high end HTML5 mobile web apps.

At the same time creating a separate website to hold the content was not an option as content updates would be error prone and too costly. A compromise was made, through a creative integration strategy, which provides an optimized mobile experience while retaining centralized control of content in Kentico. Specific elements include:

1. Navigation structure - created through Kentico API calls and custom transformations in .NET to produce mobile optimized html.
2. Mobile Content Proxy - The mobile website utilizes AJAX patterns to retrieve the content of each page. The content is produced through a custom proxy page that queries the Kentico Database returning only the mobile web part’s content. The content received via this database call is cached to optimize performance. The proxy returns only the html for the mobile site – no other content (i.e. view state, Kentico generated client files, various JavaScript and CSS files, or the PortalTemplate.aspx structure itself) is returned. This results in very fast load times (important on mobile) and provides complete control over the look and behaviour of the html.

About the Ontario Ombudsman Mobile Site

Communications is central to the Office of the Ombudsman – strong communications allows the office to raise public awareness and thus be better able to affect change. By extension, the Office of the Ombudsman's website is an important destination to provide public access to their findings. Furthermore, the Office of the Ombudsman’s website takes complaints from people who were unable to resolve their problems with the government organization's complaint procedures.

As part of a larger web re-development project Seventyeight Digital was engaged by the Ontario Ombudsman to develop a mobile specific version of their primary website. This was a key element in their larger digital strategy given the “anytime from anywhere” nature of the information and communications dialogue they are trying to elicit with the public. In particular was the need to facilitate on-the-spot complaint reporting which is automatically passed through to the clients’ internal complaint management system.
Our recommendation was to develop a web app designed for multi-device compatibility as opposed to separate native apps for each platform (i.e. iPhone, Android, Blackberry) as this approach has many advantages from initial build-out to ongoing maintenance.

1. Cost effectiveness – why build several applications to accommodate multiple devices (IPad, BlackBerry, Android) when you can build and maintain one?
2. Instant updates – content and functional updates to the Ombudsman’s website will be instantly available to users. Compare this to dedicated applications, which require a user to receive updates through their app stores.
3. Bypass App Stores – Each app store has its own rules and regulations that delay application launch and the launch of future upgrades.
4. Access – Users can access the web app just by visiting the Ombudsman’s primary web site.
5. Easier to Share – Users can share the web app by simply sending a link to their friends.

The importance of the mobile component cannot be overstated. To make a website fully accessible and encourage total engagement a mobile website is an absolute necessity given the trending towards alternative browsing devices.

The mobile web app was developed to overcome key challenges and achieve the following:

• The mobile site must be optimized for today’s smart phones and accommodate mobile constraints including reduced bandwidth, reduced complexity, mobile user behaviour patterns, and best practices.
• The mobile site must be easily navigable and optimized for touch screen.
• Content must be easily managed within the Kentico CMS
• Each content piece must be leveraged and optimized for viewing across all devices (desktop, tablet, mobile)
• Users must be given an quick and simple method for submitting complaints
• Complaint submissions need to be automatically fed into the Office’s Complaint Management System.

About Seventyeight Digital

Seventyeight Digital is a strategic technology development and interactive design firm focused exclusively on the internet space. Our team is comprised of highly accomplished and talented folks specializing in digital strategy, data management, technical development, and creative design providing the competencies, agility and technical bandwidth to manage complex deliverables. As a Kentico Certified Solution Partner, Seventyeight Digital offers a full suite of interactive design, development, hosting and support services. Contact us for a free Kentico CMS consultation at info@78digital.com.

About Kentico Software
 
Kentico Software (www.kentico.com) helps clients create professional websites, online stores, community sites and intranets using Kentico CMS for ASP.NET. It's committed to deliver a full-featured, enterprise-class, stable and scalable Web Content Management solution on the Microsoft .NET platform. Founded in 2004, Kentico is headquartered in the Czech Republic and has a U.S. office in Nashua, NH. Since its inception, Kentico has continued to rapidly expand the Kentico CMS user base worldwide. Kentico Software is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. In 2010, Kentico was named the fastest growing technology company in the Czech Republic in the Deloitte Technology FAST 50 awards.

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Seventyeight Digital is a strategic technology development and interactive design firm focused exclusively on the internet space.