SCarowinds

Halloween fans, rejoice! Few places can capture the scary holiday mood like an amusement park, complete with haunted houses, roaming monsters, and plenty of other spooky surprises. Carowinds, based in Charlotte right on the North Carolina/South Carolina border, wanted a dedicated site that showcased their event, while also being interactive and easy to use. While previous sites relied heavily on Flash content, loading times negatively impacted the experience, while information was difficult to get to. The new SCarowinds site would remain Flash-based, but primary considerations were given to quick loading and simple navigation.

The end result? A virtual halloween "world" was painstakingly assembled from hundreds of separate elements into a wide collage divided into "pages". Each page corresponded to a logical portion of the site such as tickets, attractions, or jobs. As the user moved from one page to another, the world would zoom past before finally stopping and displaying the new requested information.

Using the power of Flash Remoting, the site seamlessly connects to a backend database for easy updates. Park personnel are able to use our standard C4 editing tools to make text changes and upload photos. Since the site is Flash-based, all of the content can be much more stylized than in regular HTML.

Small touches, such as lightning flashes, pans of thunder, eerie background music, and even a video at the "drive-in" page greatly enhance the site's entertainment factor. Since it was also built with extensibility in mind, two other parks (Canada's Wonderland in Vaughan, ON, and Kings' Dominion in Doswell, VA) have also adapted the design to suit their own events -- complete with unique content and graphics.