Mon, Sep. 14 2009
Miza.com, OwenandMzee.com and Knute.com have a new aquatic cousin–Winterstail.com, the latest website to join the Turtle Pond family.
After working on webby award winner, Miza.com with our good friends at ESI Design and Turtle Pond Publications last year, it was only natural that we dive in again when Turtle Pond laid out their plans for the companion website to the children’s book, “Winter’s Tail.”
“Winter’s Tail” is the true story of a baby dolphin who, after being seriously injured in a crab trap, learned to swim again with the help of some dedicated folks at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium and a custom-made prosthetic tail. That’s right – Winter is practically a bionic dolphin.
The book and website are designed to educate and inspire adults and children alike, especially children who are amputees themselves. Interestingly, the same technology used in Winter’s Tail is also being used to develop prosthetics for Iraq war veterans.
The interactive Flash website features activities and games that include:
- Interactive video maker that lets kids make audio/video mash-ups of their favorite dolphin clips
- Fish pattern matching game
- Ocean Jammer activity where kids combine music and elements to create underwater scenes
- A live Winter webcam, videos, resources, sing-along activities and much, much more...
Of course, no Turtle Pond site launch would be complete without a big game reveal:
The Winter’s Tail game is a multi-level horizontal-scrolling game where users compete for high scores by helping Winter to navigate an ocean maze, avoiding obstacles and racing the clock to get to the whirlpool finish line.
The website is live but we’ll be updating and adding features as we go.
Check out Winter’s website here:
Winterstail.com
Tune in for a live Winter Webcast on October 7th at 1PM EST with partner, Scholastic:
Live Winter Webcast
Tue, Sep. 8 2009
When we met with the Weekly Reader News team back in June to discuss their idea for an educational website to teach the Constitution to kids all we had was a basic concept and high expectations, this being the first in a planned series of digital e-issues for a business traditionally rooted in print.
Today, just 12 weeks after our first brainstorming session, I’m happy to announce the release of the Constitution e-issues for Weekly Reader–and they got not one, but three different websites for three different age groups.
The look of each site is essentially the same but the content changes specifically for each audience.
Our animated host, the Town Crier, leads users into five primary activities: the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Framers, Time Line and the “Constitutional Challenge” Game. Each section offers a different interactive activity to engage learners and helpful tools like a hot glossary reinforce learning as kids discover embedded terms and definitions while they explore the content. Each of the five activities also includes an assessment component relevant to each section.
The activities are designed for maximum fun, like the Framers, where one can’t help but pick up interesting facts about each of the Constitution’s creators as their portraits come to life, or the Constitutional Challenge game where users earn points as they test their knowledge of the Constitution in a Jeopardy-style game show format.
Artgig created the general UI design, produced the Flash animation from supplied art, created all of the functionality to specs we developed, and we took care of all audio production & VO.
If early testing and feedback is any gauge of success, we’ve got another hit on our hands.
Check out one of the three versions here:
The Constitution
Mon, Aug. 24 2009
Que Tu Buscas? – In Spanish it means, “What are you looking for?”
When we were approached by Fannie Lanch, a New York entrepreneur and President of the Westchester Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, with her idea to build a bilingual community website portal to service the skyrocketing Hispanic marketplace, well it sounded like a no-brainer to me.
First and foremost, the website is designed to connect Employers and independent contractors, “Experts,” using a custom secure communication system. Employers may register to post jobs and Experts may register to respond to jobs. Employers may also rate and comment on Experts.
The website also features a Classified Ads section where users may register to post ads in a variety of categories and interested buyers may contact sellers using the secure communication system we designed.
The Expert’s Gallery and the Classified Ads are linked with a secure e-commerce system and there are a variety of subscription and pay-per-ad options for use of the website.
Additionally, there are a variety of business resources available on the site via live feeds from across the globe for breaking news and travel deals.
The entire system is built on our custom CMS platform and Fannie has all of the content and system management control at her fingertips in the website Administrator Dashboard. The site is integrated with Google Analytics and AdSense and we’ve also given her a custom advertising feature to target users with category-specific ads and even target users in specific countries by IP address, if she wants to.
We rolled out the soft launch today.
I think she’s offering some special pricing (translation – FREE) for new users to get people registered and using the site.
Check it out here:
Quetubuscas.com
