Extreme sports are more popular than ever, and finding a great place to practice your sport is getting harder to do. You don't want to drive two hours only to find out there's no surf, no wind or no snow.
Our client wanted to create a single source portal to let people find out not only about a place to go, but what the conditions are like right now. This is a huge undertaking, finding and populating current weather data, predictive weather models, live images, and a lot more.
We're also dealing with a web savvy, perhaps somewhat cynical, market. There's no room for error, and the design needs to live up to the extreme experiences the visitors are looking for. Definitely a project needing the Conquent team.
ActionsportsNW isn't catering to a single market, other than lovers of extreme sports. The design work needed to cross surfing, sailboarding, skiing, snow boarding, kiteboarding, and more.
The designer created a logo reminiscent of an abstract wave, or perhaps an abstract mountain, with design elements incorporating a board which could be snow or surf. The colors are bright and aggressive, and the brand incorporates a lot of photography of people doing the sport they love.
The Herculean efforts of the programmers, and the amazing graphic design from our designers wouldn't mean much if it didn't work in a browser. Fitting the pieces together took a lot of skill, especially when you consider that the information on the screen was always changing.
We believe strongly that a website should be HTML -- this means we aren't forcing the visitor to download a widget, and that the web page will work in all browsers, in all operating systems. Creating reusable images for wave height and weather information and seamlessly stitching those images together as conditions change created a consistent experience for all visitors to ActionsportsNW.
While all the data ActionsportsNW wanted to present existed someplace on the web, it wasn't always readily available. Our programmers had to create systems to pull from Naval observatories, process raw data into human readable formats, calculate tide tables for dozens of locations, stream video from remote locales and make all of it work in realtime as visitors came to the site.
The final result was stunning. Landing on a location provided weather data at a glance, often with a streaming video from the very place you want to go. No single website had ever pulled such dispirit data from so many sources and made it work; it's almost impossible to convey how innovative the team was in creating this site, and we still view this as one of our greatest programming achievements.
