The Challenge
Worldwide media company Advanstar Communications runs the world’s 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. After delivering Advanstar’s Corporate site in only three weeks. Advanstar teamed up with Achieve, again, in July of 2011 to launch a highly data-driven Drupal-based website , in time to support the company’s annual fashion industry trade show in August 2011. The administrators and talented content authors of Advanstar’s fashion division Magic who were responsible for the MAGIC site, all had deep print backgrounds but significantly less online experience. This project had a strict timeline and was required to be completed in time to support the division’s annual fashion industry trade show, which gave Achieve a little under a month to complete the project.
The administrators were having trouble populating their old website quick enough to keep up with the constantly fluctuating fashion landscape. Achieve needed to develop a content rich site that could be easily updated by the back-end user regardless of that user’s Drupal skills. Needless to say, time was of the upmost importance.
The Solution
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. 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. Achieve was also able to exploit Drupal’s data-driven content display functionality by allowing content authors to upload a logo image, one time, in one field and pull it into several different blocks, which made it possible to use the same image in multiple locations throughout the site. The Achieve Development Team was able to handle the tight deadline because of its breadth of experience and skill with Drupal development.
The Result
Achieve delivered the MAGIC site before the launch of the fashion show without having to sacrifice performance and functionality. The site now handles copious amounts of content updated almost daily, and is done so with ease by the administrators of the site. This results in a significant time savings and allows them to focus on other strategic tasks. This workflow automation helps back-end users easily get the most up to date information to the end-user while maintaining a great looking website.
Achieved
Developed an easy to use website for prospective fashion distributors, wholesalers, and customers as well as for the content authors, that functionally delivers great content with a high level of performance.