The Fusion of Flash and the Evergreen Development Platform

Salomon Snowboard & Bonfire Apparel

Salomon Snowboard and Bonfire Apparel recently teamed up with Frank Creative and Cascade Web Development to give their respective websites some much-needed revamping. For those of you familiar with Salomon and Bonfire, you know that their brand is built around producing quality products geared towards an active audience. Projecting these qualities on the web was an absolute necessity, and the development team at Cascade Web Development did its part to ensure this result.

Perhaps the singularly most defining feature of these projects is the creative integration of Flash and Evergreen, our Content Management System. Although Flash is often considered to be one of the most effective tools for creating beautifully interactive web environments, in terms of development and management, it can pose quite the headache for nontechnical individuals. Our goal was to take the skillful design work submitted from our project designers (Frank Creative for Bonfire Apparel, and Daniel Julien for Salomon Snowboard), and develop the websites in a way that the Flash pieces could be updated and edited in a seamless process through the use of a content management system. Take the following Athlete Highlight section for example:



What you see when you open this page is a row of Salomon-sponsored athlete ‘heads’. Each one is linked to a bio page where the visitor can read up on that athlete’s interests, recent activities, and random personal facts. Like the rest of the site, this feature is entirely presented in Flash--a component usually requiring the concentrated attention of a professional developer for its maintenance and management. However, being that the client required that their nontechnical staff have management capabilities over the content in this section (as well as all the other content populating both sites), Cascade Web Development needed to build a solution that could serve as a user-friendly intermediary. Allow us to introduce you to Salomon/Bonfire’s Evergreen.

Following our company code of always delivering custom solutions to every client, we dedicated our efforts on this dual-project to developing a version of no-technical-experience-needed, interface. Now with the Bonfire Apparel and Salomon Snowboard sites complete, the client can celebrate the fact that they not only received some of the most visually (and functionally) sophisticated web solutions out there, but that they’ve also been equipped with the tools to manage their websites themselves. As for us (Cascade Web Development), well we can now pat ourselves on the back for pushing the limits of our own expertise, and adding just one more set of skills to our continually evolving repertoire. (Pardon the chest bumping and high fives, we’re simply just that excited!)

All in all, what we hope you’ll gain from this article is that no matter how seemingly challenging your web-based vision is, with the right team on your side, anything is possible. Call us today to see how we can help you through your own personal web challenges.

Visit the Official Cascade Web Development Website
Visit the Bonfire Apparel Site
Visit the Salomon Snowboard Site