By Philip Tan
Kids' WB! is a separate web site from the WB site, and has a
dramatically different look and feel. It concentrates on WB children's
television franchises, providing information on episodes, promotions
and contests. Each franchise has a different sub-site that have little
in common with each other but feature the color schemes and visual
style of the shows themselves. Shows licensed from non-WB production
companies have their external web sites linked alongside the in-house
productions.
The main screen uses the 'city' metaphor that reiterates in WB's
Saturday morning station identification slots, alluding to every show
inhabiting a separate section of a 3D-rendered city. Randomly selected
short animations cross-promote other Kids' WB! shows and tastefully
contribute to the relatively static cityscape. Within each sub-site,
the quality of production varies greatly from the highly inaccurate
Men In Black section to the more comprehensive Cardcaptors site. Most
of the sub-sites provide simple, uninspired games like Concentration
and Mastermind using the franchises' characters.
Contest information is readily available and online forms provide
a
convenient alternative to the postcard entries often expected in kids'
contests. The 'Show Times' pop-up window is spartan but effective,
listing shows, times and even episode titles for an entire week in
advance. Unfortunately, clicking on the show titles brings the user
to
the sub-sites rather than specific episode synopses.
The Kids' WB! site is colorful and kid-friendly but would do well
to
bring all its sub-sites to the quality of the Jackie Chan Adventures,
which includes episode synopses, character guides, a growing number
of
Shockwave games and information on the Talismans featured in each
episode. Although it may be difficult to develop quality sites for
external franchises, most of the in-house sites could use much more
development to attract repeated visits from Kids' WB! viewers.