Practising what we preach

By Simon van Wyk

Mark Ashley-Wilson, Executive Producer at HotHouse Interactive

As an interactive marketing and technology company, we build world-class, customer-focused websites, intranets and extranets, and support them with interactive emarketing and advertising campaigns. We do this for many of the largest companies and best known brands in Australia.

With our due focus on our clients websites, our own corporate site had started to look a little tired from a design, technical and brand perspective. So we thought it was high-time we let our team of highly-honed Internet professionals loose to work their magic on it.

The brief

Our new website needed to better reflect our company, who we are, what we do and what we stand for - skilfully articulating HotHouse as the Marketing Technology Company.

Welcome to the new look HotHouse.com.au

Everything on the new site has a purpose and a reason. We’ve used high quality design and a clean and elegant style, with the navigation structure based on sound usability principles, maximising the amount of content displayed at the right time without confusing users as to where they are and where to go next.

Given the nature of the content on our site and our own specific needs, we steered away from utilising a CMS, instead we rely on our very human version sitting in our User Experience team.

Restrained use of Flash

The site is built in ASP with the use of ASP.NET for the blog and XML/Flash integration on the timeline and people pages. Flash elements are being used as enhancers to give special focus and bounce just where and when it’s needed. As part of HotHouse’s move towards standards-based accessible web development, a CSS controlled table-less layout is used to provide better usability, optimise download times and improve site management.

Since we relaunched the site we’ve had a healthy stream of positive feedback from our clients and suppliers.