PORTFOLIO
Here are a few short case studies to highlight recent work and works-in-progress:
TD Bank Financial Group Annual Report 2003
TD Bank needed their online annual report turned around quickly without sacrificing accuracy or quality. Stop14 worked with the good people at Q30 to ensure that their design for the site was well implemented. Because of the short turnaround time for the content and the high profile nature of the job, it was imperative that the site be thoroughly tested across a wide range of browsers and platforms.
Ryerson University: Continuing Education
Ryerson University’s Continuing Education realized that they needed a way to get their course and adminstrative information online in a cost-effective and efficient manner. Their demographics were changing, with both students and potential students looking more and more to the web for their needs. Ryerson CE’s process for getting their information online was very labour intensive, relying on manually extracting text from their layout software and creating a large number of static web pages. There were inefficiencies in their print management as well, with their core content trapped in a single layout file that was costly to update and prone to error. Ryerson University CE wanted to find ways to streamline their publishing process and rebuild their website in an organized, friendly manner that would better meet the needs of its students and its staff.
The solution to these problems was to reconceive Ryerson CE’s publishing process and create a custom content management system tailored to their needs. The print-to-web process was inverted: instead of extracting text from print layout software, Ryerson CE now updates their information in an XML-based online database and generates their print calendar from it. This allows Ryerson CE incredible flexibility. They can keep their online information current throughout the year while simulataneously reducing their annual publication costs. The site is built with extensibility and easy maintenance in mind: all of its navigation is automatically generated, allowing pages (and even sections) to be added, moved or updated by adjusting the database through a user-friendly interface. Work on the Ryerson CE project was done with Rhizomedia. Stop14 was primarily responsible for information architecture as well as aspects of project conceptualization and technical implementation.
Canadian Children’s Book Centre
The CCBC is an advocacy group for the Canadian children’s book industry. Their site had a series of problems: the navigation and overall organizational scheme was obtuse, making it difficult for visitors to find core information; their look and feel was unfriendly and didn't reflect their organization; the site was difficult for staff to update making it hard to keep information fresh and current; and the site wasn't very clear as to the Book Centre’s mandate or the services it provides. Moreover, as with most not-for-profit organizations their resources were limited.
Stop14 was called in to reconceive and rebuild the site from the ground up, concentrating on improving site organization, useability, general graphical friendliness, and ease of ongoing maintenance. We also improved the overall focus of the site, making sure that their key services were presented clearly and concisely. When assessing the needs of the Book Centre we realized that much of their content was news and events, so we concentrated our resources on providing a simple system that would allow staff to update current information without much web expertise. We implemented Moveable Type, best known as online journal (“blog”) software, for their news and events. Though Moveable Type is not strictly open source (as we’d have preferred), it’s free to not-for-profits and was attractive because of its robust code, extensibility, and ease of use. We also came up with an XML-based banner system that allows them to maintain a set of rotating ads to highlight services and affiliated programs. Much of the navigation is automated through Perl (or PHP in some instances) to increase overall efficiency.
Scream Literary Festival
The Scream Literary Festival (formerly known as the Scream in High Park) is held in Toronto every year, and features Canada’s largest single-day audience (of up to 1000 people) for a literary event. The Scream website has proved their primary method of getting information to its audience and needed to be updated daily throughout the festival. The Scream also has some ambitious plans in the works, and needed a system that would lay the technical groundwork for the future.
Stop14 rebuilt the site from scratch, concentrating on a clean, friendly interface. The site is currently expanding, with Stop14 implementing a number of new features, including a user-updated calendar for local literary events and the creation of a publically available archive of over 140 performances in digitized audio or video formats.
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