A New Holiday Website Helps Mercy Count Blessings
What are you thankful for this year? For everyone at Atomicdust, it’s been the opportunity to work on projects that make people smile – projects like our recent microsite for Mercy.
With the holidays approaching, Mercy wanted to give a unique gift to the nearly three million people they serve annually. Working closely with their team, we designed and developed OurBlessingsCount.com, a site that invites those people to submit “blessings,” or reflections on everything they’re thankful for this season.
Visitors to the site can share blessings in the form of stories and photographs. Animated snowflakes drift down the page to represent each story; clicking on one allows you to read, “heart,” and share the message inside. Below the snowflake scene, an aggregated, sortable list of blessings uses infinite scroll to display content without overwhelming visitors.
Because the website’s purpose was simple, we used it as an opportunity to flex our animation and user experience capabilities. Using the GreenSock animation library, a bit of jQuery magic and WordPress to manage visitor-submitted content, we built a dynamic site that displays and sorts the blessings in beautiful, flexible ways. Backgrounds are active scenes that rotate daily and transition between day and night versions. On the back end, we added special administrative capabilities to enable Mercy to easily switch scenes and animated objects to respond to changing seasons.
We’re proud that the site makes it fun and easy for people to share the incredible stories from their year. We may have built the website, but Mercy’s community is giving it its heart.
