LAUNCH DATE:
September 1, 2000

PROJECT RESPONSIBILITIES:
Project Manager and client contact. The T3 Media project team consisted of an Engagement Manager, 2 Graphic Designers, 3 Web Integrators and 4 Software Engineers.

SUMMARY:
N2H2's Searchopolis is the market leader in providing a safe, simple and productive online reference tool for students, teachers, and parents. With over 10 million users the new version of the site provides more to existing users, and expands the reach of their product to millions of new users.

To begin with Searchopolis was re-branded to better complement the identity of their parent company, N2H2. The site was then re-designed to speak to K-12 students and their teachers and parents. The new site entices users not because it’s fun, but because it’s useful. It allows users to quickly and easily find the educational content they need. The improved user interface further establishes Searchopolis as a legitimate source of information online.

Effective design of the search bar interface was of crucial importance, as the primary functionality of the Searchopolis site is the ability to easily search their different types of content. It was designed to be easily understood by both an average 4^th grader and a new adult user. A tabbed design was selected to graphically separate the three different searches, and to allow the Searchopolis team to add additional searches in the future.

In addition to improving the branding and user interface of the public Searchopolis site an update tool was built to facilitate daily content updates. A new content management system allows Searchopolis content editors to easily update, spell check, and automatically publish Today’s Word, Today in History, Today’s Birthday, Today’s Vote, and Today’s Activity. A new partnership with Webivore added a depth of browsable content to the site with weekly updates, but the data had to be newly formatted and posted with every update. T3 Media created a Perl application to parse XML content from the Webivore partner seamlessly into the Searchopolis site.

TECHNOLOGIES USED:

• Debian/GNU Linux OS, Apache web servers
• PHP for page construction and ease of maintenance
• JavaScript cookies
• PHP update tool with spell-check functionality (Aspell)
• Sybase Database
• Perl application to parse XML content to generate static web pages
• The site is 3.0 browser compatible.