Follow Me Creations

About the business

Follow Me Creations publishes interactive learning websites for curious people of all ages. It started with a single ladybird that followed your pointer down a page, and has grown into a family of five sites, each on its own domain, with a brand site at followmecreations.co.uk tying them together: Interactive Wildlife, Interactive Bugs, Interactive Pets, Interactive Dinosaurs and Interactive Garden.

What the site needed to do

Most learning pages are a photo and a block of text. Follow Me Creations wanted sites you play with first and read second, so the facts arrive while you are already interested. Each site needed its own personality and audience, but they all had to feel like one family, stay quick on a phone with hundreds of animals in them, be easy to find your way around, and work as plain, readable pages for anyone who prefers no movement.

What I built

• Five sites on one shared engine: Interactive Wildlife (over 200 animals from a British garden to the deep sea), Interactive Bugs (92 bugs from 15 places), Interactive Pets (72 pets, sorted by how much care they need), Interactive Dinosaurs (48 prehistoric animals you can hear roar) and Interactive Garden (a month-by-month guide and plot planner for grown-ups)
• Hundreds of animals, drawn for fun rather than loaded as photos, each with its own way of moving: walking, hopping, swimming, hovering or soaring after your pointer or finger
• A brand site at followmecreations.co.uk that introduces the family, with a card for every site and the ladybird that started it all following you down the page
• A page for every animal, with real photographs (credited to their photographers), facts, and where and when to find it
• Live weather, quizzes, play areas with tricks and feeding, and a spotter's list kept privately on your own device; the sites work offline once visited
• Its own preview image for every page, search-ready titles and structured data across all six sites
• A feedback box on every site, with comments emailed straight to the owner and a weekly summary
• No database and nothing to log in to, so there is very little to go wrong and pages load fast

How it works

Because the animals are drawn for fun rather than loaded as pictures, a whole cast weighs less than a single large photograph. That is why a page with a deer, an eagle and an adder on it still opens quickly on a phone.

Every page works without the animation too. If your device is set to reduce motion, the animals sit still and everything else reads as normal.

The same approach suits any business with something to explain: a product, a place, a process. Give people something to play with and they stay, and they remember it.