What are you wondering about
March of Dimes has created an interesting entry page to their Pregnancy & Newborn Heath solution center called whatareyouwondering.com.
An array of questions fills the page and an images of a baby is visible through the coloring of letters. You can type in a search term or select a topic from the drop down. Matching questions turn blue and pop out from the field of gray text. Clicking on on a question takes you to the answer page on their standard HTML website. Or you can just browse the large screen of questions for something you find questioning.
I like this solution as it’s a viral way to spread useful information and creates an interesting way to educate the user. The CPU usage is very high and seems to stall my browser when I switch tabs. Could possibly benefit from Bitmap caching.
January 4th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I think the baby animation is full screen video playing in the background and that’s why your seeing a high CPU usage, I’m guessing it’s not possible to use bitmap caching on a Video.
January 4th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
yeah, it probably is a video running full browser, but the real slowdown is probably caused from having hundreds of clickable / hover able text links. But you are probably right about not using bitmap caching on video. Thanks for your comment.
January 5th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
I just put a sample file together with just full screen links and listeners on the text fields and tested that and there doesn’t seem to be any increase in the CPU with just the text, so I’m leaning towards the full screen video being the culprit.
Even though its using up my CPU I can still have multiple tabs open along with Flash, so I don’t think normal users will have any problems, that site is fantastic who built it, I’m guessing March of Dimes didn’t build it them self.