One man. 1,240 miles. Alone in the Arctic.

On Saturday Ben will be departing on his expedition to make the first ever solo unsupported ski crossing of the Arctic Ocean - from Russia to Canada via the North Pole. He will be man-hauling supplies for the entire journey. No dogs, no kites, no guides, no resupplies. (see at BBC News: Trip to pole via land and water).

This week we launched the re-designed/branded/named Serco TransArctic Expedition website.

Spending two months on the project and working after-hours, I'm really chuffed with the way it's turned out. Under the hood, the website is built as a showcase for standard-compliant design - XHTML 1.0 Strict for marking up the content and structure, while the presentation is applied using CSS exclusively. The liquid layout resizes to fit any screen size, while the site itself should render well in all modern browsers while degrading gracefully in those not-so-modern. Using the MOSe CSS method introduced by David Shea, I've built the site to benefit those visitors using web browsers that properly support the standards - namely Mozilla (Firefox included), Opera and Safari - primarily through the use of alpha-transparent PNG images, which apart from rendering much smoother will also download faster.

Apart from some minor tweaking in places, there are some great features that we'll be adding over the course of the expedition, which is expected to last up to 3 months. But probably the most intriguing to anyone are the live dispatches. Making use of some awesome technology - a Motorola Iridium satellite phone, Compaq iPAQ, digital camera & camcorder, etc. - Ben will be updating the site himself daily with text, photos, statistical (environmental and physical) progress and hopefully on a regular basis as well, some mp3 audio clips.

The Serco TransArctic Expedition is all about exploring human, rather than geographical limits. I hope it will be a message to others worldwide that with enough self belief and determination, anything is possible.

- Ben Saunders

Best of luck mate!