Baraem
Al-Jazeera Children's Channel is a Pan Arabic education channel. Through its unique concept and a range of own produced educational programs, JCC opens up avenues for Arab children to learn about environments and cultures, as well as encourage them to learn and seek knowledge.
Al Jazeera launched its new Pre-school Channel, Baraem on 16th January 2008. Baraem TV is aimed at pre-schoolers between the age of 3-5 years.
To complement the Baraem television channel, there was a requirement for a website targeting the viewers and their parents. The site’s aim is to promote future programs, engage the users with interactive games, video and audio content and downloads.
The brief:
- Reflect the television channel branding to aid users transition to web
- Engage the target audience
- Easy to use and navigate
- Integrate seamlessly with the Baraem designed and built CMS
- Incorporate design backgrounds and characters supplied by Radiant Studios
- Develop a way of representing the time of day graphically
- Promote Baraem’s current and future programming
- Support Arabic font and character-sets
- All content will be uploaded using the Baraem Content Management System and will be in Arabic
Our solution:
We designed and developed a hybrid site of xHTML and Flash to maximize interactivity while minimizing load time. Starting with a character selection screen the user picks one of the TV channels animal icons to accompany them through the site. This character then appears on each page and dictates the background and colors of the site.
For the homepage we created a scene using hills textured with the Baraem branding. We worked closely with Radiant Studios to design graphical links to the Club House, Games section and TV guide as well as the video and audio players, kids gallery and parent and teachers sections.
For the content pages we built a series of xhtml templates. Each page contains a Flash mast which changes color depending on the current time of day, and one of four different page-footers, each of which contain a different animated TV character.
Interactive site content:
- Character selector
- Program guide 'tree' allowing user to easily view imagery of the channel programming output
- Video & audio player to stream audible stories, songs, Arabic nursery rhymes, show previews and general videos
- Photo frame picture-editor enabling user to upload an image then position and personalize with decorative elements. ‘Print’ or ‘Send to a friend’ functionality
- Baby calendar allows parents to record milestones in their child’s development
- Baraem calendar to notify parents of channel and program information and events
- Links to Flash games
Results:
- Type3 provided technical ideas and support while liazing closely with Baraem’s development team
- Type3 worked closely with Radiant Studios to ensure that the TV channel’s brand was accurately transferred from television to the online environment
- The site was delivered within time-scales and on budget