Web Design for Hollywood Suite

Web Design for B2C Entertainment

Hollywood Suite

Launch website

Next

Previous

Design Services

  • UX (User Experience) Design
  • Information Architecture
  • Responsive Website Design
  • Art Direction & Consulting

Platform

  • Custom WordPress Development
  • Custom Website Development
  • Third-party Database Integrations
  • API Development
  • Search Engine Optimization

Project Overview

Custom WordPress website design and development with multiple third-party database integrations for movie lovers across Canada.

Hand-crafted WordPress website design and development backed by a highly customized external database integration.

Who doesn’t love movies? When Hollywood Suite approached our Toronto web design company with plans to revamp their website, we didn’t hesitate to jump on board. Hollywood Suite was a familiar face for our team of web designers in Toronto as movie lovers ourselves; we were used to seeing the Hollywood Suite brand pop up when channel surfing.

Starting from the ground up, we carefully reviewed the highly technical requirements to integrate two different third party web-based services into the custom WordPress website. From this research, we put together a website design and development plan to help address some of the critical design and performance issues Hollywood Suite was experiencing with their ageing website.

Establishing Our Web Design Goals

Custom WordPress Website Design for Hollywood Suite

Our Web Design Process

Project Discovery and Web Design Strategy

We kicked off the web design project like all others by first digging into the Hollywood Suite brand to better understand the history behind the product and the people familiar with the offering. We took a deep dive into the website analytics to understand how web users find and interact with the website and where they may be having trouble finding information.

Additionally, the Hollywood Suite went to work gathering their digital assets and having fun completing our kickoff questionnaire that would serve as a reference throughout the strategy and design phases of the redesign and development project.

This information all provided the foundation for our site mapping exercise, which aims to identify all pages that will exist within the new website, where they will live in the navigation, and how they will connect.

Once our site map was complete and approved, we moved on to wireframing. This step in the project is where the new interface begins to come alive. Shared with Hollywood Suite using our web-based prototyping tool, InVision, we worked together to identify all unique layouts required within the new website to ensure a successful user journey from acquisition to conversion. The wireframes would then serve as detailed plans for the most exciting phase of the project, user interface design.

Custom Web Design for Hollywood Suite

Custom Web Design

With our new information architecture design in place, our Toronto WordPress designers set to work breathing life into the wireframes and evolving them into high fidelity designers. The initial website design concept consisted of a brand new home page design, accompanied by designs for the movies section as the heart and soul of the website. From this initial concept work shared via our online prototyping tool, Hollywood Suite could review the website design in context and add actionable feedback directly on the layouts for our creative team to address on the fly. Once the initial concept work was approved, our web designers moved on to what we call “design expansion.” This step looks at incorporating new user interface designs for all unique page layouts established during the wireframing process.

Responsive Website Design

Entertainment in your pocket.

Mobile Website Design

With the approval of the desktop web design, our team effectively split in half. Our web designers continued to create mobile design interfaces for tablet and mobile experiences, while our Toronto WordPress developers strapped in for front and back-end development.

With Google’s organic search algorithm now focused on a “mobile-first” ranking priority, this phase of the design process is essential. Understanding this requirement from the start allows our team to address all scenarios within the new website design and ensure it can scale and adapt gracefully to meet the viewing needs of all users no matter what device they choose to use. Our underlying goal at this stage is ensuring the new website flies out of the gate, ready to compete on launch day.

Responsive Web Design for Entertainment Providers
Mobile Website Design for Entertainment Providers Mobile Web Design for TV Entertainment

Custom WordPress Web Development

As our client approves the first set of interface designs, our Toronto web development team takes some time to review all functionality and user experience documentation accumulated throughout the strategy and design phases of the project. Then, when all our ducks are in a row, we begin both front and back-end development simultaneously. This split team practice allows our projects to move along smoothly and deliver successful web design to our clients quickly and efficiently.

As our web designers polished off the mobile user interface designs, our front-end developers began creating the responsive HTML and CSS that would become the fabric of the relationship between the user and the brand. As each template is hand-crafted, our quality assurance specialist tests each layout for a variety of typical desktop and mobile viewports to ensure the designs are responding as expected.

Meanwhile, our back-end developers set to work on fine-tuning the custom WordPress back-end so that it would be ready to pair with the beautiful new front end design.

The most challenging aspect of the new Hollywood Suite website was the custom integration with two separate proprietary database platforms – Broadview and Brightcove. These external platforms posed some exciting challenges for our team as they are both closed source systems with limited documentation, but incredibly powerful database features.

The new WordPress website features automatic information and asset collection from the external databases and SFTP account that occurs every night, or on-demand relative to a combination of filters within the Movies section of the new website. Our development team worked tirelessly to explore, test and refine these processes to minimize server workload and maximize the experience for website users seeking fine-tuned information about showtimes and scheduling on both digital television and the mobile application.

TV Provider Website Design

Website Deployment

With multiple systems and services working together to launch a website, we often refer to website deployment as “launch day” similar to a traditional rocket launch. Before launch day, we migrate the website from our private development server to a staging environment within the web host’s production environment. This step is similar to rolling the rocket out to the launch pad in preparation for the countdown. Having the website settle in on the staging server allows our team to carefully test all systems in their new environment as every server makeup is a little different and can cause the website to behave differently than on our development environment.

Once we have the “all systems go” message from our client, we flip the DNS to point to the new hosting environment, effectively starting the countdown. Within minutes in most cases, the DNS propagates, and the new website rolls out to the public.

Just like mission control, for the next 60 days, we keep a close eye on the analytics and server resources to make sure the website is performing as expected. During this period, we can make subtle course corrections as needed and also ensure all software is secure and up-to-date as we hand over the keys to our client.

WordPress Training and SEO Best Practices Review

Following the launch of the website, we conduct a recorded training session with our client to walk through the content management system, tools and review best practices in terms of content management and search engine optimization. The recorded screencast is available for download following the CMS demo, ensuring our clients have a fallback manual in the event a new website administrator takes over the day-to-day management, or should they forget how to use the CMS. The final training session is also a convenient way to conclude a website design project and address any final questions or concerns before removing the training wheels.

About Parachute Design

Since 2003 Parachute Design has been hand-crafting custom website design in Toronto and across North America. Our Toronto website design company has the experience and creative muscle to craft highly functional and beautiful websites for all businesses. Contact our Toronto web design agency at 416-901-8633 or complete our online proposal planner to get a free estimate for your project.

Let’s make something.

Sophisticated website design and development requires creative thinking. Drop us a line and learn more about how our experience can deliver successful results for your next project.

Start a project
sqare-shape
Manufacturing Company Web Design - Kohl & Frisch Ltd.

NEXT PROJECT

Kohl & Frisch Ltd.

Let’s make something.

Sophisticated website design and development requires creative thinking. Drop us a line and learn more about how our experience can deliver successful results for your next project.

Start a project
sqare-shape