More Background:
How has the site evolved over the years?
In 1999, recognizing an opportunity to embrace the on-line revolution, Highlights faced the task of very quickly becoming a top tier web provider to children, while adhering to the requirements of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). In close collaboration with Highlights, Jersey Cow created www.highlightskids.com, an enterprise-scale COPPA-compliant children's web community infrastructure, with support systems that enable Highlights to bring to the web the same personal communication with children that it has achieved with the Highlights for Children magazine. This community incorporates a number of innovative “Web 2.0” features including children’s publishing capabilities that let children create an publish under the Highlights brand, and daily, weekly and monthly publication schedules and features release that keep the site constantly fresh.

As the needs of Highlights grew, and their technical skills improved, we worked with Highlights to take the HighlightsKids.com web site through four generations of capability and complexity:
· 1st Generation: Simple HTML site
A basic HTML site that established an online presence for Highlights, allowing Highlights to showcase its content.
· 2nd Generation: Kid Publishing/Community Involvement
Message boards and a kid’s publishing system were introduced, allowing more community involvement for the kids. Kids are able to submit items for publication on the site. All online kid submissions are stored in the database, and allow full moderation by Highlights moderators prior to publishing the submission on the web site.
· 3rd Generation: Object-Oriented Content Management and Publishing
A content management and publishing system was established. Using object-oriented design principles, the content "objects" were treated independently from the means of delivery. This had the added strategic value of decreasing costs by enabling such things as the magazine index to be published online instead of in the magazine.
· 4th Generation: Schedule-based Publishing
This separated the processes of production from those of “publication”, allowing Highlights, in a sort of “build it and forget it” manner, to create and test content and activities for the site, well in advance of the publication date of a particular piece of content. Publication mechanisms then take care of when and how content actually appears on the site. This significantly relieves the stress on the production team by freeing them from the requirements of the daily, weekly and monthly publication dates.

Related Presentations (open in new window)

"HighlightsKids.com: A Collaboration Between Highlights for Children®, Jersey Cow®, and the Kids They Serve" - originally delivered to the Association of Educational Publishers in 2003

"Rich Tagging: Value and Vision" - 2006