opinios

Cockatoo Island Festival

The Cockatoo Island festival this Easter looks like a helluva good time. A huge lineup of excellent bands over three days, on the most amazing of locations - an island right in Sydney Harbour! Friends of mine are making a road trip of it and I'm very jealous as we won't be able to join them due to a wedding we will be attending in Melbourne that weekend. It better be a bloody good wedding (just kidding Jodes!!)

Equally as impressive, and the reason I mention the festival, is their promotional web site. The design is by an outfit called Mixed Industry, who clearly have more clients than time to put up a site of their own. The colours and swirls clearly show influence from those famous psychadelic creators the Love Police, but the style is all their own.

And unlike most Flash-o-rama web sites done by those with an artsy background, the Cockatoo Island site has been built with web standards. Well, mostly. While I haven't developed any band or festival sites, I can imagine it would be a hard sell for clients in the music industry to be convinced to let go of their pretty Flash animations completely. However, the majority of the site's content has been written in clean, valid markup that is both accessible and looks pretty when styled, with the Flash header integrated into the top of the page.

Unfortunately the header contains the navigation for the whole site, so the content is not truly accessible as per W3C guidelines. The navigation menu they have in place is something that could have been done easily using HTML and CSS, so I'm not sure why they chose to put it in Flash and restrict their user base to people with Flash plugins installed.

Still, it's pretty darn impressive and a step in the right direction. And so is the festival.