HMA - Lingfield Point
New digital strategy for Lingfield Point, Darlington
When Marchday Group plc acquired Lingfield Point in 1998 the estate had seen no investment for many years and many of the buildings stood vacant and crumbling. Over the past 10 years Marchday have invested over £35million in the regeneration of this important part of Darlington. They have worked hard to change the perception from a dilapidated industrial estate into a thriving, dynamic and contemporary business community it is today.
Our brief was simply - “create a digital experience that will reinforce the changes that have taken place and challenge the perception of Lingfield Point in the minds of people that have not visited Lingfield Point recently”.
The simplest briefs are often the most challenging and this one certainly proved to be the case, particularly when we also had to take into account complex navigation, large volumes of information, plus accessibility and search engine optimisation issues. We wanted to leave the visitor in no doubt of the investment made at Lingfield point and use massive photos to show the buildings and environment but we also needed to ensure potential occupiers could easily get to important decision making information.
“The Lingfield Point website is as inspirational and functional as Lingfield Point itself is. The website contains many hidden gems (as does the site itself) of information (easily found hidden gems), it has great navigation tools, good content and is displayed in a crisp wrapper.”
Mark Cassidy, Student Loans Company (Lingfield Point occupiers)
Our solution was a two layered approach with a Flash pictorial guide, overlaying an unconventional HTML divs site, both of which can be navigated at any point.
And for those of you who want to know more about the technical issues:
The project is highly ambitious and walks a fine line between ensuring the site works on most machines particularly in different browser versions and also will downgrade if needed.
One of the main issues we had was layering content over a flash background which has only become possible in recent browser versions. Also combining all the sites into one meant that all the content was essentially being loaded into one page, which caused difficulty with memory usage. Therefore the site had to be optimised as efficiently as possible to enable the site to run on slower machines.
We used the latest incarnation of the Mootools Javascript framework, which eased the development of the site, especially with regard to animation and remote server calls. However the site required extensive cross-browser testing due to the complexities of what we were trying to achieve.
The site also uses a lot of communication between Flash and HTML content which involved timing Javascript calls between the two to ensure functions were only called only once they had loaded and were available.
Visit www.lingfieldpoint.co.uk and see whether you think we have been successful.
