Between Firefox Personas and Google Chrome’s Themes, browser themes are getting a lot of attention this year. Brand Thunder is pleased to be at the front with such distinguished company. While each of us helps you move beyond the dull gray of the standard Internet browser and personalize your browser with enticing visuals, Brand Thunder is the only one to move the theme into the realm of experience. We make things happen in the browser to increase engagement, connection and interaction.
And to go a step farther, we are the only ones to bring this level of customization to the Internet Explorer browser. It’s an impressive feat and is in the early stages of rolling out.
Here are some of our themes that showcase the interactive capabilities of our browser themes.
Weather
The Weather Theme is a full integration using WeatherBug’s API and Brand Thunder design elements to create a browser theme that pulls in weather forecasts, local conditions, alerts, weather maps and more. The theme itself changes based on your local weather conditions. It also pulls in up to three days of forecasts into the theme (the user can set the number). Location can be set by the user, or the can choose Firefox’s built-in location services. The multimedia sidebar is a full weather station window with current conditions, radar maps, local weather cameras and more. It’s a truly amazing infusion of weather information in a stunning visual context.
The Daily Beast
The Daily Beast is a leading news site and their theme pulls an image from the latest feature story directly into the browser theme. The user can hover over it to get the story headline or click through to read the full story. The sidebar keeps users connected to the latest news via special views of the Cheat Sheet, Buzz Board, Blogs & Stories and Video sections of The Daily Beast. The Daily Beast Theme demonstrates several methods to keep their users connected to the breaking news of the day, and how to get users back to your site more frequently.
Movie Premier
Brand Thunder’s Movie Premier Theme is a fun and functional theme for us movie fans. Like the Daily Beast theme, Movie Premier has a feature block that updates regularly with the movie posters of opening movies. Clicking on the poster takes you to an overview page of the movie with reviews, synopsis and more. The theme is also tightly integrated with Fandango for instant access to reviews, showtimes, tickets and even trailers and other videos in the sidebar. It’s a great example of how content and commerce fuse together in an interactive browser theme.
Baseball for IE
The Baseball Theme for Internet Explorer demonstrates a new frontier for building community and connection within the IE browser. The visual capabilities created through this add-on have not been seen in the Internet Explorer world. It makes the visual takeover as seamless of the end user as it’s been in Firefox. It’s a significant advance and will help us better meet the needs of our clients.
I think these are killer examples of what a browser theme can be – a better and more engaging browser experience. What do you think?
