My Little Swans

Travel Specialist

Project Components

• Branding Strategy
• Email and Internet Campaign Management
• Content and Digital Asset Management (CMS)
• Custom Database Web Development
• Custom Web Application Development
• E-commerce Design and Development
• Information Architecture
• Scope, Approach and Methodology
• Interactive Flash Website Design
• Interactive Presentations and Tutorials
• User Experience Web Design
• Web Design and Development
• Social Networking Website Development

Background

My Little Swans, the unique travel brainchild of Silicon Valley CEO Katrina Garnett, aims at providing a sophisticated one-stop travel information and resource online service for wealthy families in search of new adventures. Ms. Garnett approached Lounge Lizard Worldwide to develop the My Little Swans brand and to create the website interactive platform that it depends on.

As the service is targeted to wealthy and discriminating tastes, the My Little Swans project required a carefully choreographed ballet of well-planned branding, social networking and user messaging technology, and elegant user interface design.

Our Technique

We began the My Little Swans engagement with our standard initial discovery phase, designed to arrive at a comprehensive SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats) brand analysis and to elicit useful information from the client about the site's intended subscriber and user base.

The client, a well-known Silicon Valley CEO already highly experienced in building and marketing successful Internet-based companies, came to us with a firm vision of the website she wanted to build and the market it was to penetrate (wealthy families in search of off-the-beaten-track world travel ideas). This enabled us to quickly arrive at a dynamic brand strategy, which in turn led to a visual and general look-and-feel design for My Little Swans that satisfied the client's needs.

My Little Swan's website platform is primarily a server-end application written in PHP, an open source developmental platform chosen for its highly advantageous balance of high utility, low cost, reliability and versatile ability to interface with a wide variety of other open source tools. As we wanted the My Little Swans user interface to be clean, smooth and creatively appealing, we opted to build it with a mix of PHP, Javascript, HTML and Flash.

The back end and utility aspects of the My Little Swans site got more interesting, as it would not only serve static content created by the administrators, but would also feature complex social networking, user messaging and user-provided content (including photos and travel advice) as well. My Little Swans users would be able to "click and drag" travel database elements into their own personalized travel itineraries; they would also be able to contribute photos and their own experiences into the service database for other users to use. To achieve this we developed a custom social networking engine and content management system (CMS), built upon a MySQL database platform.

Result

My Little Swans launched in November 2008. Today Lounge Lizard Worldwide continues to help in furthering the My Little Swans brand, as well as in maintaining and updating the website's technology platform.