Drupal Hits the Catwalk

Do Fashion with Drupal

Worldwide media company Advanstar Communications runs the worlds two largest fashion shows every year.  The Magic Show is held in Las Vegas twice a year and attracts the world’s largest designer and retail brands.  In addition to their Las Vegas shows Advanstar also provides events, publications, directories and websites in 11 diverse industries, including Powersports, Medical, Life Sciences and Automotive.  Advanstar’s online needs are vast with offices around the world, they needed to find to partner with a company that not only offered Drupal Expertise, they need an organization with the depth and experience of working with an Enterprise IT department to handle a variety of different projects.   Advanstar choose Achieve Internet.   

Advanstar Corporate Site

The first project Advanstar tapped Achieve to develop was the Advanstar corporate site (www.advanstar.com), a rapid-turnaround project that tested Achieve’s ability to deliver a high quality site in just three weeks.

Advanstar’s CIO, J. Vaughn, gave Achieve a great deal of latitude in developing the corporate site. “We delivered mocks [mock-ups] and Achieve turned it around faster than we could get it developed in house or by any other third-party development company to my knowledge,” Vaughn said.

Advanstar gave some designs and ideas for a few of the main pages, but allowed Achieve’s developers to use their Drupal expertise to extrapolate the design concepts to the remainder of the pages and make recommendations as they went along, a process that worked well for Advanstar’s busy executives. “Overall experience working with Achieve has been an extreme pleasure. The back-and-forth collaboration is very helpful to figure out the best way to build a designer website,” said Vaughn.

Achieve took advantage of the flexibility Advanstar exhibited in the project to let their developers fully exploit Drupal’s functionality such as using sprites for images, a process that allows a single image to be uploaded and used in different places on the site and in different ways.

Achieve delivered the corporate site in three weeks, turning it over to Advanstar’s Drupal experts, who were able to easily add content and launch the site in March 2011.

MAGIC Online Site

Next, Achieve Internet worked with Advanstar’s fashion division, MAGIC, to launch a highly data driven site taking advantage of the power of Drupal  in July 2011, in time to support the division’s annual fashion industry trade show in August 2011 (www.magiconline.com).

The challenge with the MAGIC site was that Advanstar’s very talented content authors all had deep print backgrounds and a lot less online experience. To overcome this challenge Achieve felt it was important to architect the MAGIC site so that almost all of it, including block content, is managed at the node level. For example, all content in the area that site visitors use to register for the MAGIC fashion show, including background images, button images, and lists of links, are all managed by fields in “Registration Box” nodes. This allowed the administrators to focus on the final look of each section and not concern themselves with the workings of Drupal’s block system.  All in all a much better user experience for the administrators, which is often overlooked by many Drupal installations.

Achieve was also able to exploit Drupal data driven content display functionality by allowing content authors to upload one logo image in one field and pull it into several different blocks, using image styles to treat the image differently. The addition of new nodes also added that node’s logo image to the various blocks. This allowed Advanstar’s content authors to work with the site more transparently.

Next Up for Advanstar and Achieve - Project

Achieve just finished a redesign of Advanstar’s other fashion industry trade show website called PROJECT (http://project.magiconline.com). PROJECT hosts trade shows in Las Vegas in August, and in New York in January. The focus for this website is to utilize the functionality of the MAGIC Online site while implementing a different theme. We expect Advanstar to launch this site in November or December of 2011.

Achieve looks forward to partnering with Advanstar on their next exciting project.