Sony European website redesign launched

New Sony websites are 'like no other'

6th September 2005 - At 8pm this evening all European websites for Sony Consumer Electronics were relaunched with a brand new look & feel that ties in with the new Sony catchline 'Like.No.Other'.

Spex provided Sony with the look & feel and client side coding of the new sites.

The redesign covers 38 countries in 28 languages including Cyrillic and Greek character sets. The design is flexible enough to cope with languages such as German and Polish that have longer word lengths and therefore take up to twice as much space as the equivalent English phrase.

The websites have been redesigned with web standards in mind.

Why web standards? - When the new Sony 'Like.No.Other' global catchline was launched a site redesign was required. The previous tables based design was difficult and costly to maintain and the sites needed a major overhaul to comply with accessibility legislation. These factors led us to standards based development.

There are multiple back end systems feeding the site with product information, stories, press releases and sales data. Multiply 2,000 product lines and hundreds of articles by 38 countries and the complexity of the project can be understood.

Development Team - The development team is split across multiple countries - UK, Belgium & Turkey. This means project communications and resource management needed to be tightly controlled.

Coding in the dark - At the start of the project we knew the page functionality but the look & feel was yet to be agreed. To hit the deadline a decision was taken to code the HTML with a wireframe CSS and drop the look & feel in once it had been signed off. To achieve this pages we coded with extra hooks to allow for any challenges the look & feel could present. From a technical standpoint this is the part of the project that we are most proud of - when the look & feel was finally agreed the HTML changes required to replicate the design were minimal.