Creative Nature Communications has been announced as a finalist at the 2009 Web Awards for its development of an engaging online presence for exclusive arts educator, John Curtin College.
John Curtin required a website that would draw interest from parents, teachers and students and promote the College as an educator of choice. The new web presence was to be a lighthouse for other school websites by combining new accessibility friendly development measures with rich media.
The John Curtin College website uses two streams of automated content feeds – news and events - that are automatically updated by staff, and dynamically feed from the index through to the homepage – catering for a constantly changing, fluid homepage layout. All functionality is supported by Creative Nature's CMS and its powerful editing and content management tools.
The standout features on the JCC website is a virtual tour, which displays 360 degree panoramic photography of key locations on the campus. The flash begins at a detailed aerial photograph of the campus with rollovers overlaid on the Theatre, the Reception and the Quad Area. On mouse click, a 360 degree panoramic photo can be viewed at the speed and direction of your mouse, providing a real-life, detailed viewpoint of the campus and its facilities and an intuitive way of scanning the facilities.
The John Curtin website required to balance the use of mixed multimedia and basic common website elements in the Department of Cabinet’s Office of E-government standards or (CWE). Accessibility options include the ability to resize text, skip links and a logical tab order to navigate using assistive technologies, view pages in text only formats and print friendly page style sheets (leaving out non printer friendly content).
This is the first year that the Web Awards has become national, attracting entries from all around the country. The winners will be announced at the Perth event, which will coincide with the Edge of the Web conference.
This is the second consecutive year that Creative Nature Communications has been nominated for an award. In 2008, Creative Nature won the Best Government and Best Overall Website for the Frogwatch website, a joint project between Alcoa and the WA Museum.