I have a friend named Jack, and he wants a Nintendo Wii really bad. We collaborated on a project called DestroyMyVirtualBoy.com, where if he collected enough donations to buy a Nintendo Wii, he would smash his Virtual Boy. The site incorporated both web and video.
The web site needed to have a sort of neo-retro feel to tie together the theme of the red-and-black Virtual Boy and the sleek white Wii. I found a template called Revival.1 on OSWD that hit the idea almost perfectly. I darkened up the background and changed the color on a few pieces to get the site to match what we were going for, but the color scheme and feel was there right away.
The site also needed PayPal and YouTube integration. Both of them were surprisingly easy to set up. The money was a bit more difficult because I had to manually update the progress image in the sidebar. Still, these pieces were very simple to add to the site.
We did what we could to market it: submitting to Digg, a MySpace site, YouTube videos, general plugging among our friends and on a few messageboards. Still, we never managed to go viral. I have great respect for all the marketing people that do, and even more respect for all the regular people that do. It isn’t easy to get people’s attention. I learned making this page that eyeballs are power, and we just couldn’t get enough eyeballs.
Click the image below to visit the site (and donate, if you wish ;))
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