Briefing
The client, an international film festival currently at its 10th edition, needed a complete redesign for its website, which was built with a visual composer template that made the content upload, editing and display not sustainable and at all. A navigation redesign was also needed, considering the large amount of the website's sections. Moreover, the performances of the website were pretty poor: the platform definitely needed a boost.
Process
As a preliminar stage, I interfaced with the whole content team of the festival: it was a complex operation involving several professionals like project managers, press release managers, marketing and content experts, in order to build a strong, scalable and sustainable structure. Together, we could define a new, more immediate navigation structure. What I brought to this conversation was the need to differentiate between the current edition and the past editions, because they don't share the same content structure - depending on the festival's theme - and have completely different visual identities.
Once the new structure was defined, the second stage was to design it: I created an Adobe XD prototype - using the festival current visual identity - and shared it with the team, in order to discuss it and keep the conversation open. My design goal was to fully incorporate the brands identity of the current edition: colors, visuals and event some fonts would change every year, while still maintaining full consistency in the design.
The last step was to build and code the website's infrastructure. For the backend, I kept the WordPress CMS because the content operators were familiar with it, but I improved the interface by inserting many settings to manage the platform data and branding in a clever and easy-to-use way: my goal was to make the client independent on that.
Eventually, I had to take care of the frontend: I used a SaSs preprocessor, Node.js and npm to generate compressed CSS and JS, in order the keep the website as lightweight as possible, considering the amount of content, templates and pages.
Once the new structure was defined, the second stage was to design it: I created an Adobe XD prototype - using the festival current visual identity - and shared it with the team, in order to discuss it and keep the conversation open. My design goal was to fully incorporate the brands identity of the current edition: colors, visuals and event some fonts would change every year, while still maintaining full consistency in the design.
The last step was to build and code the website's infrastructure. For the backend, I kept the WordPress CMS because the content operators were familiar with it, but I improved the interface by inserting many settings to manage the platform data and branding in a clever and easy-to-use way: my goal was to make the client independent on that.
Eventually, I had to take care of the frontend: I used a SaSs preprocessor, Node.js and npm to generate compressed CSS and JS, in order the keep the website as lightweight as possible, considering the amount of content, templates and pages.
Output
The end result is a website that is able to completely change its identity year after year without losing integrity, with a CMS that can handle a complex platform's content system in a very easy way. Many professionals and volunteers work on the website when the festival is airing, and they usually don't have any IT experience or knowledge whatsoever. This system makes them manage the content in an intuitive way, with no error margin.
