The WWF Global Network www.panda.org
There is a good word to describe the international WWF site, and it is ‘big.’ To include all the areas that the largest independent wildlife and conservation organisation in the world covers would take a very long time - but not half as long as it takes to do a full tour. You’ll find easily enough information, pictures, movies, news, quizzes, factfiles, clickable maps, searchable databases, conservation updates and ways you can help to last you until Christmas. It’s vast. Where to start?
The Newsroom is as good a place as any - it features up-to-the-minute campaign stories from around the world, and a search facility so you can look for articles in their archive. Moving on at random, there’s the kids section, which is great. Amongst other things, you’ll find a collection of quizzes to test your wildlife knowledge - some of which are quite challenging - and a ‘virtual wildlife’ section where you’ll find tons of animal information. There’s a geography/ecology section, called ‘Wild Places,’ which lets you visit virtually any habitat on the planet. There’s also a teacher’s archive, with educational factfiles galore, all arranged in useful categories. To make any use of the ‘Earth Reports’ video library, you’ll need the ‘realplayer’ plugin (free to download), but, once you have it, you can view dozens of movies on a wide range of wildlife and environmental topics.
One area of the site that really stands out as original is the ‘Panda Passport’ section. The passport is a ‘campaigning tool,’ enabling you, sitting there, to use the internet to do some worldwide conservation work. Travel with a single click to any country and find out about issues that interest you, and then take direct action, by emailing organisations in positions of power, or signing online petitions. By personally taking part in campaigns, you can build-up passport stamps in your own password protected passport, and apart from the satisfaction of being involved, you can get special passport-user screensavers, gain access to exclusive website areas, and even get a WWF T-shirt.
And there’s more: you can find out in great detail about WWF campaigns and research projects, register for your own, personalised webpage, browse the photo archive…. oh just go and see for yourself - this space is just too small to do it all justice.
Richard Northover