Media Centre
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- Sheena Scott, Web Development Officer, Canadian Tourism Commission.
"We liked winning an Interactive Media Award for this project in 2010, but the best part was the thousands of new journalists we reached around the world."
Media Centre
The media division of the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC) wanted to share fresh story ideas with journalists around the world, let them download assets and inspire them to write stories about Canada. They needed a content management system with the technical flexibility required to fulfill this objective as well as the flexibility to integrate with social media tools including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and RSS. They turned to us for a solution.
After a deep dive on the future needs of the CTC Media Centre, we mapped out a scalable solution that included direct integration with their digital asset management system for all digital content for display on the site or downloadable by journalists, for further extension of the assets.
The website itself is modularized, so that the CTC Media Centre is able to self-manage all content and components. The website was designed to align with the existing brand so that visitors have a seamless experience navigating through the family of CTC websites.
Journalists can comment on articles on the site, allowing a discussion between independent international journalists, on topic and fully visible. The site integrates a media library, twitter feed, an open-forum blog, rss feed, tag clouds, related stories links and personalized news alerts. The interactive flash map showcases key features about Canada for those in the international news audience who need spatial visualization to improve their understanding of our country.
We also created a mobile version of the website which auto-detects a mobile visitor and provides a unique experience designed for access to relevant content on your mobile device.
Using the Drupal CMS, the site was built to W3C standards for accessibility, as well as being multilingual. These technology standards increase the reach of the website, helping a broader community of journalists bring Canada to the world.
With fresh content being created regularly, and industry peers sharing feedback on blog posts, the frequency, quality and reach of the stories being created are miles ahead of the B2B (media centre to news outlet) stories broadcast on the previous site.
Through the integration of new technology modules into the company's existing site design, the client was able to avoid a major technology change, and have benefited from better data about their target market digital media use.
As a result of the success of this project, FCV was awarded an 'Interactive Media Award' in the two categories of News and Travel & Tourism.