Jordi Romkema

On February 20th Nickelodeon launched a new website in The Netherlands and in Belgium. We created a new interactive playground for the kids. We got fed up with the old site, especially when it came to the content management system. Besides the CMS the site desperately needed a new and fresh design because the navigation on the old site was terrible. Anyway, now all of that is in the past and luckily the new site is a huge success.

Launch

A promo aired on television during commercial breaks announcing that the old site would be demolished and that a new one would take its place on February 20th. Kids were asked to come to the site that day to help Nickelodeon launch the new website. They had to answer questions about different Nickelodeon characters. Each correct answer would help to get closer to the end result: piece by piece puzzle pieces would appear with each amount of correct questions from all the kids. When all of the puzzle pieces had appeared the site was finally launched and accessible for everybody worldwide! As said, the launch was a huge success but also a huge hit on our servers. Fortunately the site was running stable again after the kids went to bed

Promotional video where the old site gets demolished and the launch of the new site is announced

TurboNick

Nickelodeon is known for its cartoons and live action shows for kids. It has an extensive library of video content but this was pretty much inaccessible on the old site. The new video on demand service is called TurboNick. There is one main TurboNick player where you can access all of the shows and view their episodes. This streaming on demand service is supported with streaming advertising. You can also watch live to Nickelodeon or to the digital music channel Nick Hits or to the pre-school channel Nick Jr. Throughout the website lighter mini versions of TurboNick can be found featuring promos, leaders, idents and shorts.

Cartoon Creator

Another exciting feature is the new Cartoon Creator. I’ll go into much more details later since this has also been a long running project of mine. With the Cartoon Creator kids can create their own SpongeBob Squarepants cartoon from scratch. They can publish it so that other kids can watch the cartoon and rate it or send to their friends.

Games

A very large number of games can be found on the new site and new games are added weekly. The games are very popular with the kids, if not the most popular part of the website. All kinds of games are on the site: mini games, puzzles, action, adventure, racing, etc. Every week we launch a new Supergame. This is a slightly larger game than all the other ones and promos air on television to notify the kids about the new Supergame.

Promotional video for the current Supergame

myNick

Kids can sign-up with their own Nickelodeon account, called myNick. With myNick they have instant access to competitions where they can win exclusive prizes. They can add their favorite videos, games and cartoons to their own private homepage. This private homepage is completely customizable. They can drag and drop windows and change the theme of their homepage.

Minisites

Nickelodeon has many shows as you can see in the image above, all of them with their own little homepage containing videos, games and information about the shows. They all have their own theme based on the show. For this we developed management system where we can deploy minisites with just a few clicks in our content management system. All we have to do is to tell which modules a minisite uses (video player, contests, polls, etc.), drag and drop them into place, change the theme and voila a completely custom minisite!