It was a long time coming, but it is definitely worth it. The all new rolex.com site is finally live. This is the last project that I worked on at Critical Mass for close to a year. I was one of the tech leads (flash side). It wasn’t a year of programming, there was a lot of planning that went into this site. Unfortunately I left with a month and a half remaining in the schedule and had to hand the reigns over to Scott Ingalls who led one of the best teams I have ever worked with to completion. On the tech side I worked with Geoff Sowrey, Jim McFadyen, Scott Ingalls, Craig Banfill, Tim Uruski, Natalia Schmiemann, Jeff Laforce, Fraser Crosbie, Jesse Knowles, David Chambers, Jeremy Foster, Martin L’Hereaux, Lying Liu, Troy Gullage, Nick Simonsen, and David Gluzman.

This site was a true testament to team work, from the designers, to the project managers, to the executives, to the clients, to the qa team, and to the developers, I have never worked with such chemistry. Sure there were speed bumps along the way but everyone worked together to build an amazing site.

Some of the features of this project, I can’t list them all, but some key ones are, fully search engine optimized, even the flash side. Back button works in Flash. Deep linking and bookmarking works in flash, dynamic repositioning based on the size of the users browser/resolution, and the biggest challenge, or accomplishment (however you look at it) is the entire site is managed with the Red Dot content management system. Red Dot was never developed to manage a site of this size and complexity. And definitely was never developed to manage a Flash site. With a whole lot of great minds it was accomplished.

I learned a lot from this project, and not only on the programming side. I learned a great team makes a great project and that everyone contributes no matter what their role. Heck, I even provided some design ideas at one time.

Great work guys, you really should be proud of yourselves, now go get some rest and look me up next time you’re in California. I am drinking Rolling Rock right now as a tribute. The bottle is Rolex green