This has been my favourite project in recent years. With a vested interest in the cinema, I was thrilled to help Twisted Pear with a complete rebuild of the Screen Australia website.
With over 20,000 pages, it was a daunting task, but all team members and stakeholders brought their A-game, and the result was truly world class.
This website rebuild began long before I was involved. Twisted Pear have always been the custodians of the site, and – to their credit – Screen Australia spent almost 12 months researching usage patterns and planning the architecture for the rebuild. This research was led by Morgan Richards and was largely responsible for the new site’s ultimate success.
With the research and planning phase completed, I was initially recruited to process the findings into a definitive site structure and provide a comprehensive set of page template wireframes. I’ve had a lot of experience in this IA/UX role and it was very satisfying to bring that knowledge to the table prior to design and development. We used a ‘cloud-based’ prototype tool – UXPIN – which included responsive layout options and allowed stakeholders to collaborate their feedback directly.
Once the structure had solidified, Luke Berreux took over the design. I’ve worked with Luke since the 90’s and his expertise in responsive web design is clearly evident in this project: The progressive navigation system is deceptively simple, and the lightweight interface cleverly showcases the rich imagery of our film industry with minimal overhead.
The designs then came back to me to be built – and it was hugely satisfying to bring them to life. I had recently upgraded my ‘full-stack toolkit’ and masterfully implemented all the latest techniques and best practises – often continuing into the night out of pure enjoyment.
The website runs on the Kentico CMS which is managed by lead developer Will Price. After building the new page templates, I then went on to assist Will with integrating them into Kentico. Critical to this phase was the massive amount of legacy content that needed to be imported from the old site, but this had always been a primary consideration of the project manager Nik Riddell and that fore-thought made the process relatively painless.
When compared to our British and Canadian colleagues, the new website clearly puts Screen Australia in front. I’m extremely thankful to Twisted Pear for involving CJWEB in this opportunity.
Oh, and it also won Kentico’s government site of the year for 2016!
