April 22nd, 2010 by Jeff Hipp

Making the Tweetsie Website 3-D!

About this post:

Senior Designer, Jeffry Hipp, gives a brief description of the Tweetsie Paper Train project - and promising initial results.

NewCity has a talented bunch of people working here. Many of us have hidden talents that don't always get used on a day-to-day basis. One of mine is sculpture and paper sculpture.

NewCity concepted and designed a 3-D paper train which was presented to Tweetsie R.R. Theme Park as a promotional idea to help drive recurring traffic to their website throughout the year, even in the off-season which is traditionally slow. The folks at Tweetsie loved the idea and it has been kicked off with a series of six objects for 2010 (2 Locomotives, 3 train cars & the Fall favorite, Ghost Train) being released in intervals throughout the Summer.

All are based from Tweetsie's real-life locomotives and associated train cars. Each item is designed from scratch in Adobe Illustrator CS4 (using detailed photos supplied by Tweetsie) and offered as downloadable PDF files for the user to print at home. There's an art page of pieces and an associated assembly instructions page for each one. One underlying idea for this was to create something that fans of Tweetsie of all ages and Railroad enthusiasts would love, and would love to share. http://www.tweetsie.com/kidz-zone/paper-train

Initial Analytics for ONLY the first 24 hours from it going live and public e-News announcement being sent out are exciting! The Tweetsie Paper Trains have had 2,174 page views, and over 1000 downloads.

First two assembled train pieces

Follow up - May 4, 2010 Two weeks after launching the initail paper train the analytics show that it has 3652 page views with an average of 1:21 mins spent of the page, and over 1600 downloads. The Bounce Rate was 29.39% which is excellent, (since anything under 60% is considered a good bounce rate and anything under 40% is considered an exceptional Bounce Rate).

The first two paper trains alone (engine #12 & tender) have generated close to 7,000 page views between April 20th & June 1st!