threpublik.net

After sweeping up 24 Addy awards in this year's competition, including four golds and a "Best in Show", local advertising agency The Republik decided they needed a fresh website to go with their swank new building in downtown Durham. Months were spent in design and development, perfecting the completely new site that went live today at http://therepublik.net . The site gathers information such as name, favorite color and animal, adjusting itself to speak uniquely to the preferences of the user and remembering those settings for their next visit.

The Republik's interactive team wanted to create a strong visual metaphor to represent the relationships between The Republik, its clients, and their consumers. The clever result is a field of colored bubbles (representing different consumers) attracted to The Republik and their clients. As the bubbles are influenced by the advertising, they change to match the client's color scheme.

Design in hand, The Republik partnered with boutique interactive production teams outside the agency to bring their vision to life. Thanks to existing professional relationships, they could count on having access to the kind of high-octane technical juice other agencies only dream about.

The 3D interface takes advantage of recent additions to the popular Flash player, allowing 95% of users to view the dazzling experience without a plugin download. And the other 5%? Not to worry, an HTML-only version serves those on older browsers or iPhone devices that don't support Flash.

"Since its debut in the 90's, Flash has had downsides -- though due mostly to popular misconceptions regarding what is and isn't possible. We've done everything we can to remove those barriers, and we're really proud of the results," says Jon Williams of shovemedia who produced the Flash ActionScript code. "Browser back button? Got it. Bookmarking? Yes. Search-engine friendly? Absolutely."

Although there are two distinct versions of the site, they're managed together. Longtime Republik partner Thirdparty Labs handled the content management system (or CMS). "We've built dozens of sites on Carbon, our custom CMS solution," says owner Rob Ruchte, "but nothing quite like this. The level of customization is pretty intense -- even for a company like ours that's been doing this since the .com bubble. Supporting multiple content types and devices on a site this complex is a challenge. Browsers want XHTML, Flash wants XML, a mashup application might want JSON. Video for the browser doesn't play on the iPhone. The CMS technology we've developed handles all of that under the covers, relieving content editors from the burden of managing multiple versions for special cases."

Google's Analytics service tracks visitor stats to a degree not available in most Flash websites. As word of the launch passes from blog to blog, The Republik's management can follow the conversation via referrer logs -- lists of sites that feed incoming link traffic. Measuring success and failure becomes, in some cases, as easy as reading a pie chart, though you can bet they'll prefer to keep score in number of new multi-million-dollar accounts.

Testimonial

At The Republik, we have a bad habit of coming up with ideas that require programming that's never been attempted before. Impossible to execute ideas. For these ideas, the only developer we trust is Rob Ruchte of Thirdparty Labs.

Here's how we described what we wanted him to do for our website:

"The site needs to be filled with little animated spheres that move with liquid fluidity and cling to our clients' brand names like bubbles clinging to a piece of food floating in a glass of effervescent beer. Oh yeah, and the bubbles need to change colors based on the user's input and we need a real simple to use CMS to change clients whenever we want."

Not only did Rob and his team deliver the above, they delivered it on time, under budget and even better than we imagined. In fact, CA picked it as one of their Web Picks of the Week.

Or how about the time we asked for a fully functional social networking site where users could upload and share videos, photos, podcasts on message boards for 65 different college sports teams - in less than three weeks - including time for us to design the darn thing. Did Rob shake his head and say, "No way. Can't be done?" Of course not. "Can't" is simply not in Rob's vocabulary.

I could go on and on about how great Third Party Labs is and tell you about other amazing projects we've collaborated on but right now, I need to think of some more impossible ideas for them to execute for a few of our other clients.

So, if you're smart you'll consider Thirdparty Labs for your next project.
If you're really lucky, you'll hire them before I do.

David Smith,
ECD, EVP, Partner