Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.
By PAIRODIME on
Union Binding Company is an independent brand founded on supplying snowboarders with the best snowboard bindings on the planet. Every winter season we rebrand our website to match the current product line of snowboard bindings and softgoods. With home base in both Colico, Italy and Seattle, Washington and front end design teams from Portland, Oregon, Union is truly an international company. Lets just say, we use a lot of Skype. Core UX design is supplied by Aaron Draplin of Draplin Design Co. with supporting graphics and web development by Brian Gonzales of Pairodime Productions. George and Joni head up logistics and Martino is the is the final voice of reason. In the end we team up to create a great digital marketing experience that is both engaging and informative.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Drupal is the best open source CMS period. We leveraged Drupal's ability to handel multiple languages, search engine optimization, dynamic content authoring, and flexible module and theming framework. This season we upgraded from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 and enhanced the experience with mobile specific content.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Dealer Locator & IP Specific Information
We have distribution around the world with our product in thousands of retail stores so a huge focus was on our Dealer Locator. Our dealer locator is a set custom drupal modules hosted by Brand Apps. We used IP location detection to provide Dealer Information without initial user interaction.
We also utilized Smart IP Module to help us identify User location based on IP. This was extremely useful for display appropriate content to certain visitor from various locations.
Multiple Languages
Our site needed to explain key product features in various languages to accomodate our diverse clientele. Drupal helped us prepare content in English, French, German, Italian, and Japanese.
Intuitive Design and UX
Our primary design focus was to keep things simple. We want the user to not be overwhelmed with options, but be lead by clear decision making links to information about out company, product and team riders while at the same time adhering to our branding guidelines. We used Cufon Javascript Font replacement to keep branding aesthetics and also retain search engine value (SEO).
Mobile Experience
We have a focus on a youth market demographic. These are people currently in a retail store who are currently needing quick information about our product line. Our desktop website is quite graphic heavy and relies heavily on Javascript at times, because of this we decided to provided a unique mobile data set base don the original Drupal CMS entity content. We used Theme Key Module for theme switching and used jQuery Mobile framework for the base of our UX. Combined with Multiple Languages, this was a huge success.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
We build our own custom theme as this gives us the most flexibility and control over the final design of our website. We relied heavily on custom jQuery interactions and interlaced with custom themes and modules to provide the data sets we needed.
The modules were all chosen to effectively produce a multilingual website with some enhanced features based on device and ip detection.
Community contributions:
Along the way - we ran into some snags with Drupal 7 and Internationalization. Thankfully there is an amazing community out there who we were able to share, contribute and exchange ideas about problems and resolutions through drupal.org forms and local Drupal User Group of Portland.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Project team:
Sectors:
Sports
Comments
pretty awesome..
question on how you're handling the mobile side of things with this site... any elaboration on your thought process and your decision making (as well as alternatives you threw out would be appreciated...
Toughts on Mobile Techniques
We decided to go with a dedicated mobile approach because it allowed us to render the entities on a per theme basis using Theme Key. If we were to go purely responsive design - some of our images are too big large and not appropriate for small data plans like AT&T with 200MB plans - we could also drastically change the layout and javascripts applied on the theme layer - especially the jquery mobile framework. Don't get me wrong responsive themes like OMEGA are radical - just not always appropriate for the task at hand. Whats your thoughts on mobile execution?