Sullivan Solar Power, a leading renewable energy company, has won the Silver Medal by 2013 W3 Awards for both Clean Energy Generation and Construction sites.
The W3 Awards, sanctioned by the International Academy of Visual Arts (IAVA), honours creative excellence on the Web, and recognizes the creative and marketing professionals behind award-winning sites, marketing programs and video work created for the Web.
“We were amazed at the caliber and quality of work we received this year," said Linda Day, director of the IAVA.
"Our winners continue to push the envelope of Internet creativity and Web design, and it is gratifying to see such great work from the smallest agencies to the biggest firms."
The
Sullivan Solar Power website was originally created in 2004. Since then, the company site has been redesigned several times since inception to stay current with its visitors’ needs. The website’s current design was engineered with enough forward-thinking to remain technologically ahead of its time today and well into the future, according to Sullivan Solar Power.
Behind the scenes, the Sullivan Solar Power website was hand-coded from scratch, implementing HTML5 and CSS3. “HTML5 and CSS3 were in their infancy, nearly still prototype, when we built this website," said Michael Chagala, director of Information Technology at Sullivan Solar Power. "Both technologies have been adopted across the Web since."
Even visitors with disabilities were taken into consideration with tie-ins for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), allowing for an improved experience for those with software such as screen readers.
Attention is given to every detail to ensure cross-browser performance, including visitors on mobile devices.
“Our goal is not actually to build the most advanced website, it’s to deliver content that meets the needs of our visitors,” said Brian Seymour, Web developer at Sullivan Solar Power. “These technologies simply facilitate this goal.”
Sullivan Solar Power’s online storefront is a living website, meaning that it is in a constant state of development. Content is refreshed, news and blogs updated, images rotated, and pages sprinkled with video. The most active sections of the website are the residential and commercial portfolios; every installation that Sullivan Solar Power completes gets its own page on the website, including real-time performance information and emission reduction estimates.