Before I begin telling you why this site, Sliced The Movie, is so cool I need to talk to you about the robots.txt file. What is a robots.txt file, you ask? Well it’s a file that resides in the root directory of your site that gives specific instructions to the search engine robots about what to read on your site. 
When you are developing your site, presumably on a subdomain of your site, the first thing you want to do is something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
That way the search engines won’t index your site while you’re still testing it prior to launch and it won’t come up in the search engine results pages. Worse, it won’t come up in the search results above the actual site. Yikes.
This is real basic, web development 101, kind of stuff.
Another thing you want to do when your site is entirely built using Flash is to make sure you have some meta data, like meta keywords, meta description, < h > tags, etc. This way the search engines know what to do with your site and if say, someone hears about this cool new website, they go to Google and type in the site name as a term (Sliced The Movie), you want your site to come up first not completely absent from the search results.
And I cannot stress how easy and useful it is to have a Sitemap. As well as non-flash content. Ok, I’ll shut up about all this stuff now.
Once you get past all the SEO mistakes the site is fun. It’s a spoof on horror films like Halloween, Saw or Friday the 13th. According to the Ad Agency’s press release:
“The website, www.slicedthemovie.com resembles a typical movie trailer site. Visitors can view and download the Sliced the Movie trailer that parodies several classic horror films. The “movie” opens on a group of fruits as they celebrate the end of summer at a relative’s isolated and abandoned cottage. As in most horror films, the visitors quickly become ill at ease as they realize something is not right at the cottage. Predictably, the power goes out and one by one the fruit are found “dead” – blended, sliced, grated and juiced to death. Periodically, a silhouette of the killer, a VEX bottle, can be seen. Typical imagery and themes from a host of classic horror films are visible throughout the trailer.”
The trailer was directed by Alex Wittholz and produced by Helios Design Labs in Toronto for advertising agency GJP (Gee Jeffery and Partners) also in Toronto for the launch of the new VEX flavor, Strawberry Orange Banana Hard Lemonade.
The ability to create a site like this has everything to do with the rapid pace of internet growth, from interactive technologies to the ever increasing data processing speeds brought on by broadband, allowing you to watch huge files seamlessly. But given this rapid pace of growth and constantly changing technologies it becomes more and more important that creative agencies understand the medium. There is more to internet marketing than creating a site, producing a fancy commercial and putting it up for viewing. You also need to know how to get people to your site.
Stats:
PR0
Alexa 1,902,212
Compete N/A
Screenshots after the jump.
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