Intro

In spring 2019, Ontario Place was dealing with growing pains. They had worked with an agency to develop a new website in 2016, but in the span of three years their operation had changed drastically — so much so in fact, that they were having issues updating it properly for their new on-site programming and Cinesphere IMAX film screenings, and they wanted to see if Stratasfear could help bolster their existing site with a better visual presence. After digging into the code, we decided it was probably best to start over: making their programming and film screenings much more prominent from the ground-up.

The Website

As an Ontario government non-profit event site, and prominent tourist attraction, Ontario Place’s summer program was set to launch June 1st. We had one month to churn out a robust multimedia site build based primarily around an events management system and an English/French multilingual system — this ultimately led us to abandon their existing multilingual service in favour of one that worked more cohesively with their events system.

Using Stratasfear’s Modulus Framework, we set to work on a Tier 3 intermediate multi-page build, which would allow Ontario Place’s content management team to easily control the content across the homepage, carousels, sidebars, pages, blog/news updates, and events (in both English and French).

We additionally built out a custom film management system that hooked into the events system, improving the workflow for the Ontario Place team by allowing them to update a single location of film information rather than 2, which would also propagate automatically across the website in four key places: the homepage, the Cinesphere portal, page/post sidebars, and the events calendar itself. This was further improved by implementing the film posters and stills already accessible by the team so that they would no longer be required to construct custom graphics for each film.

Post-launch, we upgraded Ontario Place to a full Tier 4 advanced multi-page site build, adding in two custom systems: “Special Programs” and “Artists”. “Special Programs” would allow them to create a showcase page for an ongoing program running on-site (in this case, Jazz Sundays at the Vista Eatery), and then they would be able to create individual Artist profile pages for each performer for this series, link these to their respective individual events in the events calendar, and then link the individual events back to their corresponding Special Program page to auto-generate a schedule grid component. This three-tiered inter-connectivity would also auto-generate custom content blocks on each of the sections cross-linking to the other two sections and allow users to freely jump around the website with ease.