UK publishing house get widgetised
Our client is a high profile
Having recognised that the readers of one of their magazines, aimed at teenage girls, are spending a large proportion of their time online engaging with social networking sites, their in-house development team built a social bookmarking website.
Cool branding, funky features and an engaging tone of voice make this website ideal for further distribution via widgets that can be grabbed by readers and placed wherever they want.
Nixon McInnes’ social media specialists provided guidance on how best to go about this and ultimately designed and built the widget.
We can’t say who our clients are currently because they are in live beta testing and don’t want to publicise the project at this stage, however we will announce more in good time!
Translated
We started by sharing our knowledge about widget design and development, helping our client clarify their ideas within the technical and design constraints.
We worked up the proposed user experience in wireframes and translated the website identity into the widget interface.
Widget distribution platform Clearspring proved the perfect partner with which to work, enabling us to build a widget that is universally available to any social network or blogging platform.
We like Clearspring, they have set themselves apart from other platform providers through the clarity of their documentation, their comprehensive reporting interface and the responsiveness of their technical team.
Nice quote from Steve Touhill, VP Business Development of Clearspring:
“The NixonMcInnes team’s grasp of technical requirements and design best practices, coupled with a quick turnaround on a tight deadline, made them a real pleasure to work with. We are looking forward to growing our relationship and leveraging their expertise on future client engagements.”
Created
So with our assembled team of experts we created an application that lets users and the magazine editorial team share content with each other via RSS feeds.
Two versions are available, with registered users enjoying a richer experience - they can choose the content displayed within their widget and see content bookmarked by their friends.
Unregistered users see content provided by the editorial team which can then be filtered by category – and of course, are encouraged to visit the site, register and customise their widget.
By grabbing the widget users can post, send, or bookmark it; save it to their desktop or pop it on their Bebo, MySpace or Facebook profiles – enabling them to enjoy and share the brand experience wherever they are.
Delivered
With this project our client is creating a wider, more complete social networking experience for the audience and increasing exposure to their great content amongst their target market.
Hey presto, a nifty little widget that contains its very own inbuilt growth cycle. Perpetual motion, nice!
The widget is live and available on the social bookmarking website as we speak. More to follow - watch this space…
