Loy Kee Best Chicken Rice

My friends and colleagues often tell me that during brainstorming sessions or internal presentations, I become quite a storyteller. I like to add a little drama on how I chanced upon and developed a certain idea.

The guys at Loy Kee Chicken Rice looked me up a couple months ago asking for a new website.

"Ehh! you do for us ah, must be cheap-cheap, good-good hor! Dowan too fancy! Simper one can already!"

It seemed to me the usual bread and butter Web 2.0 HTML work I was familiar with. So I produced some mocks of a blog-style paper texture overlaying a wooden tiled background, infused with the indo-chine influences which inspired the Hainanese immigrants in Singapore to conjure their famous Chicken Rice. They absolutely loved it. The oriental feel, the flavours of heritage and the brown-orange tones guiding the page.

A job well done I thought, case closed, now we settle the price (oh god, the hard part).

That was all before the younger tiers of management within their franchise took a look at what I was offering and showed the top brass what Flash websites were. They then took to ask me if I had the capability to develop an "interactive experience".

Heavens. Clients are all the same when it comes to buzzwords.

Anyway, it slowly became apparent that I was actually in a pitch! The guys had gone around to several other "web designers" to get their designs and quotations. Crafty, they are. However! The good news was that because I had said, "Yes, I can do full Flash sites and make your site a total 'immersive experience'" they had told the other "designers" to stop work.

Flash, to me at least, is not merely a specialised profession. For me, it's a fuel. I kinda live for Flash work, especially the kind that I can go completely wild in terms of creativity and concept. What Loy Kee was offering me was near-complete creative control over the entire flash site (although after all the "minor" changes, the site didn't really look like the initially proposed).

Having said that, I've worked extremely closely with the very youthful and tech savvy owners of the franchise to create the immersive and experiencial site that they were looking for.

Last week, after much quarrel with their hosting company (whom I suspect is probably one of the agents who were told to stop work and lost the contract), Loykee.com ver 1.1 went online as a soft launch. I say soft launch because the owners still have a Mandarin version which is due end of this year. In addition, they want to be able to continually update the elements with the latest promotions.

The structure of the site is very similar to my old portfolio website. Each element on screen has its own properties (speed, weight, rotation, position etc) all of which affect the fluidity of the site.

Essentially, there is a movement engine built into the site. Adding additional content will no doubt cost in terms of design work, but at the same time, turnaround is expected to be fairly swift. The owners wanted the site to have modularity. This is satisifed in the way each element represents a different snippet of information. My critics will say this may appear incoherrent to some, yet, at the same time, it gives definition and uniqueness to a F&B related website.

I have yet to see another hawkeresque eatery invest time and effort into developing such an online interactive experience.

You can view the live website at www.loykee.com.