the cat|grep diaries

Having worked in the web hosting business for a while, you get used to the occasional call of “Why isn’t my SEO working”… then you look at the site and the content is practically non-existent. This is why the phrase “content is king” is echoed often. However, while it may not contribute as much to the coveted SEO ranking, the presentation of great content is just as important. I’ve clicked on many top Google searches and then immediately hit the back button because the site was soon convoluted that I couldn’t get to the content that I was looking for. The top-ranked search may get users to your site, but a great user experience is what will keep them there.

One example comes to mind as what I think is one of the most impressive sites I’ve ever visited (Which is unfortunately no longer available).

Back in 2013, Pharrell Williams released “Happy”, and if you had a pulse then you know the song well. It was incredibly popular and dominated the charts and the internet. On its own, it was just fine, but Pharrell decided to take it to another level with a concept never done before… a 24-hour music video. The idea was to have the song on a constant loop in 5-minute segments. Each segment followed different people dancing and having fun to the song, and the segments were seamlessly linked. The scenes picked up from the same spot in location, and took you on a tour while very unique performers took their turn (even the camera guys got their own segment). Location and time of day were taken into account, and at the end of the 24-hour rotation you found yourself back at the same starting point at the same time of day. The site was appropriately named 24hoursofhappy.com and it was very impressive.

So from a design perspective, how do you present something like this? Among the things that had to be considered, the following stand out in my mind:

• Video Compression – 24 hours of video is a lot, and to serve up that much at a respectable resolution takes some good compression choices. This is NOT my area of expertise, so I have no way of knowing how they pulled this off.
• Platform – No matter what video compression magic you cook up, this site needed to serve up lots of video quickly, and to a massive audience. This means a combination of power and availability.
• Interface – Clearly, users expected to load a single 24-hour video to skip though. They needed to be able to change between segments easily to both keep user interest and to make it fun for the enthusiast to really dig into each segment.
• The “spirit” of the content – The song is about being happy, so the site should make you happy when you check it out, right?

The execution was spot on. The site presented the video in a clock interface. The clock was broken up into the 5-minute segments, and allowed you to click each section. If you changed segments, the next segment would actually pick up at the same point in the song, giving a nice sense of fluidity and making you somewhat abide by the rules of time. This was freakin’ brilliant and made the site lots of fun to navigate.

I’m not sure what platform was used to host the site, but load times were super fast for both the site itself and video segments. I played around with it a lot during its peak, and was surprised at how well it performed considering the amount of traffic that it had to be getting. I really wish that this tie was still up so that I could study it further.

The developers clearly were in tune with the artist and the message they wanted to send with the site. This is something that separates an engaged developer from one that just takes a generic theme, does some tweaks, and copy/pastes some stuff. It will cost more time and money, but you get what you pay for. Decide what your business, your message, is worth to you, and get a dev team that can convey that message for you!