Profile

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

On 5 March 2004, Ben Saunders set out to ski solo more than 1,200 miles across the Arctic from the Russian edge of the arctic ice pack to Canada via the North Geographic Pole.

In the weeks that followed Ben experienced what NASA called 'the worst conditions on record'. Of the four solo expeditions that started out that year, one died and two were rescued suffering from frostbite and injuries. Ben was the only solo expedition to make it to the North Pole and in doing so set a world record; he is by far the youngest person to reach the North Pole solo.

Ben continued on towards Canada, but conditions worsened and he was told by his expedition team that he would have to be picked up. Despite not being able to reach Canada, Ben set another British record for the longest solo arctic trek, skiing more than 1,000km in treacherous conditions.

This website tells the story of the expedition.

Objectives

Dream project, dream client! Having tinkered with web design himself, Ben approached me to design his expedition site with a clear idea of his tarket market and requirements. He understands the benefits of developing a standard-compliant website, and in so doing providing his visitors of all ages with an online presence that is usable, accessible, downloads quickly and is well presented.

Working after-hours against a tight deadline, I set out to design a site that would showcase what can be accomplished using standard-compliant methods, while also pushing the envelope a little. I planned to create a fluid, resizable layout for all screen resolutions, with multiple columns to accommodate the large volume of content.

For the backend, a system would be required to interface with the third-party dispatch software Ben would be using on his iPaq.

Features & End Result

• I used CSS exclusively for presentation and XHTML to semantically structure the content. Macromedia Flash was used to build the dynamic Route Map, showing Ben's daily progress.
• PHP and MySQL were used to build a dispatch system that could interface with third-party software which Ben was using on his iPaq. This system also allowed visitors to comment daily on each dispatch and used cookies to welcome them back to the site, and remember their details.
• I made use of Apache's URL-rewriting technique to build short, clear permalinks for each dispatch.