WETA, the PBS presenting station for all of Ken Burns' documentaries, hired kapow to write, design and develop preview and broadcast websites for the latest Ken Burns' documentary, The National Parks: America's Best Idea. The preview site was launched six months before the broadcast of the documentary to helped raise awareness and build excitement and buzz about the show. The preview site included interactive postcards, downloadable wallpapers, a story-sharing application, and a park badge social media application, as well as links to the documentary's Twitter feed and Facebook pages.
The final website presented in-depth information about the history, parks and people highlighted in the documentary. It provided access to watch the full episodes online for a limited time, and also offered a wealth of photos, video clips and other auxiliary content.
Site features include:
- Customized Django management framework
- Searchable multi-media library of photos and videos from the series
- Parks explorer application displaying map-based locations and descriptions of 300+ parks in the National Parks Service
- Scrapbook allowing site users to compile, save and comments to their own personal collection of photos and text snippets from the site
- Share Your Story area that solicits stories, photos and videos from site visitors about experiences in the national parks
- Parks Badges social media application, which allows people to display badges for the parks they've visited on their Facebook, MySpace and blog pages