The Charitable Adventurer
Charlie Martell is a Former Royal Engineer who in 2019 attempts a Guinness World Record feat – to be the first person in history, to row solo and unsupported across the North Pacific Ocean, from Japan to the USA, land to land.
We were delighted to be asked to create a new website for a Team Hesco challenge, Pacific 2019, which sees Charlie Martell attempt to become the first person to row land-to-land across the Pacific.
Having discussed some ideas and concepts with Charlie, we were thrilled for the opportunity to work on the project. Once requirements were established and thinking beyond the challenge, we decided to create a second website for Charlie to incorporate existing material from previous challenges as well as future challenges. We considered this when creating Sitemaps and Wireframes to structure the content across the two websites to make all the content available whilst focussing the Pacific 2019 website on the present campaign and challenge.
To get the website up and running so the team could begin the task of building the profile of the challenge, we decided on a three phase approach, with the majority of important features available at launch, then refinement during late 2017 and 2018 and finally a third phase to be completed in Spring 2019 to deploy tools for the live challenge.
Having watched Charlie’s incredibly emotive video from the 2012 challenge, we wanted to create an experience that would convey the scale of the challenge, describe the resources on board Charlie’s boat Blossom – and be able to tell the story live whilst Charlie is rowing the Pacific.
Long-time collaborator and friend of Charlie, Richard Sudbury, had created branding assets, graphics and a set of infographics, which brilliantly convey the sheer scale of the challenge and the resources aboard Blossom. We used the infographics as inspiration for the two custom-built experiences on the site: ‘Blossom’ and ‘The Journey’. For coverage across all popular devices and browsers, we created these experiences in HTML5, CSS, jQuery and JavaScript.
Based on Richard’s brand, we developed a theme for Pacific 2019. It doesn’t get much more widescreen than the Pacific Ocean, the website needed to be very visual, showcasing the breathtaking photography and leading the visitor through the story as well as providing information about the sponsors and causes benefiting from Charlie’s fundraising activities.
With the first phase of the development complete, to maximise efficiency and save time and cost, we then cloned the Pacific 2019 website, created new navigation and recoloured the theme before migrating all the existing material for the second website to feature on charliemartell.com.
In Spring 2019 with the challenge approaching, we have added interactive elements to the website, which will integrate with Charlie’s on board Yellowbrick system to ping Charlie’s location regularly to a map in real time.
Whilst Charlie is at sea he will be feeding information and content back to us via satellite that our team will publish to help followers stay up to date and help promote and fundraise.