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By Northern Commerce on
Western Fair District is the largest multifaceted complex in London, Ontario Canada and surrounding area. It is a year-round entertainment destination that offers dining, horse racing, gaming, sporting events and leagues, comedy, music and live entertainment, a farmer’s market, trade and consumer shows and historic annual fall fair.
Brief Description of Project
Years prior, in conjunction with a successful rebrand, the Western Fair District launched a desktop-only website. The rationale at the time was to be all things to all people, and the website reflected this. Unfortunately, a lack of strategic direction in the information architecture and navigational structure coupled with a flawed search appliance was delivering poor and timely search results leading to unsatisfactory overall site experience.
In addition, the website was not WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliant, had no mobile experience, and contained many Adobe Flash elements which made much of its content cumbersome to some, and inaccessible to many others. Updates were time-consuming and expensive as it often required that staff go back to the site’s developer to make any changes. Certain sections of the site were locked out and cumbersome to update.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Redeveloping the main portions of the Western Fair District using Drupal 7 would meet the current and future needs of the District because Drupal offers:
- An affordable Open source technology
- Granular user control
- More streamlined and user friendly content editing
- Content models for more flexible content
- Role specific editing experiences
- Versatile editing experience requiring less specialized image editing knowledge
- Responsive design for mobile devices like phones and tablets
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Using Drupal, Northern addressed all concerns of the client and developed a streamlined and intuitive information architecture and navigational structure, created strong content models and followed a clear and focused content and social media strategy. A fully responsive and WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliant site structure made all parts fully accessible and sharable via social media channels. An open source SOLR search appliance was added to create meaningful, relevance based search results, greatly improving the discoverability of content.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 7.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
These modules were necessary to help effectively promote key events and activities, through creative application of subpages. A focus is on the District’s eight internally run shows and meshes with Western Fair’s “Be Entertained” tagline.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Sectors:
Entertainment
