Indigo-2

Aviatours - Fear Of Flying, who we posted about back in May 2007, have entered 2008 with a new and fresh design. Redone in XHTML and layed out purely in CSS, it makes for a much leaner site, which is good practice for both SEO, usability, and minimising bandwidth usage.

It’s more than just a reskin, we’ve also added an RSS feed for subscribing to news updates, an iCal calendar of all the course dates (thanks to the Bennu PHP iCal Library), and marked up all the contact and event data using microformats - which as you may have gathered we are big fan of.

Here at Indigo-2 we aren’t shy of experimenting with new technologies and techniques, the web is a fast changing landscape and keeping abreast of the latest developments is a must.

Our latest experiment is with microformats, which are all about standards for representing things like people, events, tags, etc in HTML. This means it is easier to share that data with others.

Right now there isn’t a lot being done with microformats but they are getting momentum and some interesting applications are appearing. One such application is Technorati’s tool to add microformat contacts to your address book. Another is the Operator toolbar for Firefox that lets you interact with microformats.

When you combine this with Google’s announcement that Google Maps will use microformats you have some very efficient tools for searching for people and businesses and importing them into your address book.

We’ve already started using microformats on our parent site, Indigo Clothing (see image above), and one of our client’s sites, Stems Florist (see below). To try out before examples, the aforementioned Operator toolbar needs to be installed.

Microformats are a simple but powerful way of representing data on the web and and we look forward to maximising their potential in future projects.

Indigo-2 has done some clever stuff with Code Igniter (an open source PHP framework) for Loans Checker. We designed and built this clean looking loans checking form for one of our clients who is involved in the affiliate marketing world. Under the surface, mulitple variables determine what fields are displayed to the user based on the data they enter.