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In its latest anti-HIV/AIDS campaign in May, UNICEF Canada used its Web site to educate, inform and motivate site visitors to act.

For instance it sought to encourage people to purchase a Gift of Hope for their mother on Mother's Day – and in doing so, to support UNICEF's global efforts to stop the transmission of HIV from mother to child.

To grab people's attention, the UNICEF Canada Web site included a variety of compelling elements.

One of these was an inspiring video titled The Gift. Narrated by actress Gwyneth Paltrow, The Gift is a beautiful tale, based on a poem by Simon Armitage.  Filmed on location in Rwanda, it tells the story of how one woman gets AIDS and subsequently passes it on to her children.

The site also included an "ambassador's page" featuring several celebrities, promoting the cause.

While the content was phenomenal – UNICEF Canada sought to do much more. It wanted to have a more dynamic site -- one capable of effectively handling all stakeholder needs, and being changed on the fly.

To accomplish this, the non-profit organization turned to Innovasium Inc., a Web design firm based in Markham, Ont.

The company has completed several projects for non-profit outfits, as well as government and healthcare organizations.

The idea was site to consolidate all of UNICEF Canada's program information about HIV/AIDS on the site, said Innovasium president, Daniel Hageman.

Most importantly, UNICEF sought to offer information on HIV prevention and the protection of vulnerable children and orphans.

"Our design challenge was to pull together a site that could handle all the various stakeholders' needs and bring all the information together into one easy-to-navigate site," Hageman said. Several Flash components also needed to be integrated into the site, he said.

So Innovasium set about the task using its proprietary software, dubbed ForeFront -- built using Adobe's ColdFusion Web scripting language.

ColdFusion helps to serve up content in a very dynamic way, said Hageman. He said it enables a variety of stakeholders to contribute to a Web site, managing different parts of the site.

Innovasium created a video wall on the "ambassador's page", and when you mouse over a video, it animates and plays a short clip before you click on it.

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