SATAchieveMore.com
The College Board approached Armchair Media about doing a branding microsite for a high school aged, college-bound audience. The goal: to make the SAT seem cooler so that more students would sign up to take it (as opposed to the ACT).
The concept
“Meet me in the future …″ Students (ideally) complete the sentence “I will be …” Answers have ranged from inspiring to offensive (which have been deleted), but the response has been good, in our opinion. And at least one student called it “inspiring.”
The technology
SATAchieveMore.com integrates a Flash / ActionScript 2.0 front end with a PHP+MySQL-driven back end. I did the bulk of the ActionScript development, and worked with our motion graphics developer to integrate the motion effects. I used the CodeIgniter framework to develop a middle layer that does the communication between the database and the SWF. I also used CodeIgniter to develop an administrative tool (to manage submissions) for the client.
Why CodeIgniter?
I chose CodeIgniter because it’s extraordinarily easy to configure and learn, and it’s well-documented. Aside from one day lost to some excess whitespace, developing with CI was easy and painless.