Gatorworks | Baton Rouge Web Design & Development

Last Fall our team, led by Creative Director David Link, developed an innovative flash-based web application targeted to children called Santa’s Online Wishlist. The Christmas website invites children to dress a snowman, read letters from other children in Santa’s mailroom, add toys to their wishlist in Santa’s Toy Factory, and best of all write emails to Santa Claus himself. The child’s experience of Santa’s Island can be guided by an elf if they so wish. The helpful elf gives pointers to the child on where to click and what can be done on each area of the site.

Here is a quick tour of the main areas of the site:

Once the child creates an account, he/she will be greeted by the elf and see this home page. This is Santa's Island where the child can begin their journey!

If the child clicks on the snowman, he/she will see a naked snowman with a box that contains various articles of clothing and accessories. The child can click and drag the items over to the snowman to create one of their own. If an article of clothing doesn’t look just right, then the child can drag the item over to the trash can to remove it.

We decided to make a cowboy, bowler Snowman!

If the child goes over to Santa’s Mailroom, he/she will see a very active room with letters being sucked down a pipeline and being dropped into a pile in the center of the room. A friendly elf is quickly sorting the letters into “naughty” or “nice” pipelines that go directly to Santa’s office. If the child clicks on the colored letters on the ground, he/she can read a letter written from other children to Santa.

The Elf in Santa's Mailroom quickly sorts letters from children across the world.

Santa’s Toy Factory is my favorite part of the website. This is where children can see the worker elves in action making plenty of toys. There’s a countdown to Christmas on the wall at the top right, and the child has the option to click on a toy of their choice on the conveyor belt. If the child clicks on a toy, a window will pop-up that pulls the actual image of the product from Amazon. Then, the child has the option to add the toy to his/her “wishlist.”

Toys are quickly being assembled by elves in Santa's Toy Factory.

The final component of the site allows the child to email Santa Claus, and the child has the option to include items in the email that they selected from Santa’s Toy Factory.

So, as you can see, this was a rather involved project that required a great deal of custom illustration and then custom animation (and action script) using Adobe Flash. We were very excited to win an ADDY for this project at the 2010 awards show this year.

I invite you to visit the actual site so you can see these screenshots come to life and hear the jolly Christmas music we have playing in the background. If you have children, I encourage you to let them visit the site and have some fun next Christmas!

Do you like this site? Check out some other completed projects by our award-winning team.

I wanted to take the opportunity to thank all our clients and strategic partners for a great year. We were fortunate to work with a number of really wonderful people and highly successful companies. We look forward to an exciting 2010!

Check out a small sampling of some of the websites we’ve designed, developed, and maintained throughout the last year.

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11:20AM
I’m here at day 2 of BarCamp NOLA 2009 in the LaunchPad building. We’re in concept meetings to discuss a system that would recruit and mobilize volunteers for the Greater New Orleans public schools. We think we want a system that will showcase current volunteer efforts as well as help communicate how prospective volunteers can get involved. More updates to come!

11:30AM
The techies are in the LaunchPad conference room planning out the technical aspect of the project. Matt Tritico is jumping from the concept meetings to the technical meetings to try to keep an open dialogue between both groups. Our goal is to have a system by 4PM today. We’re thinking WordPress might be the technology to use.

11:40AM
Tritico just ordered pizza- will be here in an hour! Gatorworks will host the system.

11:55AM
Chris Schultz is heading up the concept meeting, and we’re going through our site architecture. Chris’ wife just walked in to join us! Here’s the temporary link for testing our system: http://www.gatortesting.net/schooldistrict/

12:10PM
The proposed domain name is nolaschoolvolunteers.org

12:25PM
The email address info@nolaschoolvolunteers.org has been set up. Our concept meeting will be meeting with the technical guys after lunch. Lunch should be here within the next 15-20 minutes I think. We’re going to purchase a WordPress theme to use.

12:40PM
We’re breaking for lunch right now. We’ll be back online in a bit!

1:00PM
We’re back at it- both the concept group and technical group is now coming together to discuss our ideas. We have 3 hours to code the system!

1:20PM
Chris Schultz just finished briefing the room on what our concept meeting discussed. Now Stanford Rosenthal is briefing the room on what the techies discussed in their meeting. I think the site architecture is pretty much finalized. We’re discussing specific WordPress plugins to use, etc.

Our goal is to thank the past and current volunteers of the NOLA public schools, report the latest happenings of volunteer projects in the schools, and help mobilize new volunteers for the NOLA public school system.

1:30PM
We’re getting ready to break out into teams again. We’re going to have different teams assigned to developing the various WP plugins we’ll need to achieve our goals. We’ll have copy writers working on gathering content. The energy is great in the room…people are stepping up and taking ownership of various pieces of the project.

2:10PM
The theme has been selected, and we’re getting ready to install on the server now. Thanks to Marc Juneau and Chris Schultz with the help on selecting the theme. We have several dev groups working on the WP plugins, and Andrew Larimer is going to work on modifying the design.

2:20PM
The theme is now installed and activated at http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org. We’re working on customizing the site according to the site map and architecture we’ve put together.

2:55PM
Things are coming together. We’re going to re-group in about 5 minutes to see what needs to happen during our final hour of development. I’m working on a press release that will communicate what we’ve done for our local community and help encourage technology professionals to join us for our next BarCamp. We are talking about planning a BarCamp in Baton Rouge in the Spring of 2010!

3:40PM
I just finished draft 1 of the press release, and I’m feeling pretty good about what was accomplished today. We have about 20 minutes or so left, and I think we’ll be in pretty good shape. Tung Ly has been documenting everything we’re doing so Troy Peloquin of the Recovery School District will be able to take this system moving forward and be able to update the content on a regular basis.

4:15PM
We have some guys working overtime over here at BarCampNOLA. However, the project is just about finished, and we just need to populate with content now. Check out http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org.

4:30PM
Ok, I’m going to go ahead and call it a day. We did it… we developed a website in ONE day in support of the New Orleans public school system. BarCampNOLA would not have been possible without our sponsors: Voodoo Ventures, LaunchPad, Humid Beings, Gatorworks, and Newstwit.com.

Today was truly inspiring.