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By warrenpaulnash on
Warren Nash is based in the UK and creates online-based cooking videos for simple recipes. To establish an online presence for the brand, Drupal was chosen as the CMS of choice for the website. It needed to be simple to use and sync seamlessly with the video content on the Warren Nash Youtube channel. The website also needed to promote recipes made by Warren and connect users with the various communication channels associated with the brand.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Both Wordpress and Drupal were considered for the project. Whilst Wordpress provides an effective platform for blogging, the CMS was limited in terms of extensions and customisation available. Therefore Drupal offered the ability to create a more advanced and professional website.
Because of the experience of the developer, ease of coding up the website was a major factor. The extent of modules and themes available on drupal.org and the support available in the community therefore made Drupal the perfect choice for a reliable platform that's easy to set up.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
After undergoing a recent name change, a rebrand project was undertaken for the website as well as implementing a mobile friendly responsive design. The content creation process also needed to become more streamlined than before. The Warren Nash Blog was running on another platform which needed too be migrated to Drupal allowing everything to run seamlessly on a single CMS.
Warrennash.co.uk previously ran a multisite installation to cater for mobile users that were redirected through a user agent switcher. To simplify the installation and adhere with Google's new preferred guidelines on mobile-optimised sites, the AdaptiveTheme theme was used to create a responsive design. It proved simple to work with and met the requirements needed to cater for mobile visitors.
In order for the back-end users of the site to create recipe pages, a simplified process was required to create the content. Drupal offered the functionality to use forms to create recipe pages - this made it easy to add all the recipe details (ingredients, directions, calorie count etc) as well as the CMS automatically embedding the relevant cooking video from Youtube and updating the iTunes podcast feed with the information entered.
Before the rebrand project, the main website ran on Drupal and the Blog ran on Wordpress. To simplify further and keep as much of the content creation on a single platform, the blog was migrated onto the Drupal installation. Coding up of the blog on Drupal was simple with only a few PHP adjustments required.
The rebrand project took 1.5 months from receipt of the new designs and brand guidelines from a freelance designer. On completion of the project, the website now operates a lot more streamlined and manages itself more independently than before, especially through using rules in the Views module to automate the display of content. As well as automatically updating with feeds and embedding content from Youtube.
As a result of the improvements made through using Drupal, there has been a significant increase in traffic and engagement on the site and a reduction in bounce rate due to the stronger brand.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Views was essential in providing the search functionality on the website as well as providing a flexible way to present content. In order to produce a responsive mobile design, Adaptive Theme was used. The Content Templates module made it easy to create different templates depending on the content type and works well in conjunction with CCK fields.
To help with the sites on-site SEO, Nodewords makes it easy to associate Meta data with content as well as dealing with Canonical tagging. The Google Analytics module easily links the content with a Google Analytics account by embedding GA code on each page.
Community contributions:
Jeff Burnz
dawehner
Project team:
Warren Nash
Matt Edson
Sectors:
Arts
Media
