City of Burnaby: Golf Burnaby

The Client

Burnaby is a city in British Columbia, Canada. Located in the center of Metro Vancouver, it's the third-largest city in the province, with over 249,000 residents. Burnaby is known for its beautiful surrounding natural environments and diverse culture — making it a sought-after place to live, work, and play.

The Situation

The City of Burnaby’s Golf Burnaby website modernization project aimed to replace the previous site built in 2015 with a redesigned site that could better meet its staff and customer needs. The City wanted an upgraded content management system (CMS) to provide a user-centric, service-oriented web experience, allowing users to access and navigate services and information more easily. 

The Challenge

The City of Burnaby wanted to extend the Acquia and Drupal solutions already in place for the City's main website to redesign and modernize the GolfBurnaby.ca website and CMS, while simultaneously planning for future city-services websites using Drupal's multisite capabilities. But having never used Drupal's multisite capabilities before, the City realized that it needed assistance developing the right approach. 

At the same time as the website modernization project, the golf course management system was being replaced, aiming to improve the customer experience for online tee time bookings and launch its first mobile app, and the City was migrating onto Acquia DAM (Widen).

Specific goals of the Golf Burnaby website modernization project included:

• Redesigning the information architecture of the Golf Burnaby website
• Redesigning the look and feel of the Golf Burnaby website
• Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9
• Developing Drupal multisite capability for future city-services websites
• Migrating the site to Acquia Cloud Platform
• Integrating with Acquia DAM

The Solution

The City and implementation partner Versett completed various discovery, design, and development activities and deliverables over seven months. Wanting to leverage its existing Acquia and Drupal solutions for its main website, Versett redesigned the site's information architecture, reducing the main navigation menu options from six to four, consolidating golf lessons and clubhouses information under the Golf sub-menu and associated landing pages, and giving the site's blog content more prominence in the main navigation menu.

Additionally, Versett and the City's marketing team collaborated to revamp the site's look and feel based on the visual brand standards already in place on the City’s main website. They created a color palette that includes the main colors in use on Burnaby.ca while introducing two unique accent colors for use in key call-to-action buttons and promotional content areas. Additionally, the teams revised the Burnaby.ca style tile to represent GolfBurnaby.ca and guide the visual designs of core pages, and reviewed the Burnaby.ca UI library to determine which components could be reused and what new components needed to be designed for use on the Golf Burnabye site and future multisite installations. 

By replacing Drupal 7 with Drupal 9, the City can enjoy a more visual editing experience with Layout Builder, making it easier for the golf and marketing teams to change content and pages. The upgraded Drupal version further supports the City's ongoing maintenance updates, future upgrades, and enhancements.

Versett additionally established a multisite approach, developing Drupal multisite capabilities that can be leveraged across future city-services websites. Versett performed strategic planning of the site modules, content types, custom blocks, listings, theme components, media management, and permissions to ensure that only elements that are most likely to be reusable were included. Now, future multisites can be spun up highly efficiently while contributing to the overall sustainability of the City of Burnaby's various online platforms.

After completing the City's migration of Acquia DAM from Classic to Widen, the GolfBurnaby.ca build could use the new Acquia DAM module. This module syncs assets stored in Acquia DAM with Drupal's Media Library, and Burnaby's marketing and golf teams can browse and select images, PDFs, and videos without leaving the Drupal content editing interface. Permission settings in Acquia DAM control access to the associated GolfBurnaby.ca media category to display only the assets available for this website.

The Results

Taking only seven months to complete, Golf Burnaby's website modernization project was the City's quickest site redesign and Drupal upgrade. With video content and hero imagery, the new website showcases the urban and natural beauty of Golf Burnaby's courses and is easier for the golf and marketing teams to maintain.

Since GolfBurnaby.ca launched, the site has had a 36% increase in monthly site visitors and a 27% increase in monthly pageviews.

Together, the new website and golf course management system replacement have helped the City:

• Gain and retain customers through digital channels
• Connect with golfers via the communication channel of their choice (website or mobile app)
• Provide golfers with up-to-date information through user-friendly digital channels
• Provided a unified look and feel across channels
   

Additionally, building the multisite web presence lays the foundation for the City of Burnaby to continue to broaden its online channels, allowing future City service-oriented websites to be spun up more quickly. It provides a unified brand presence on the front end and a consistent content editing user experience on the back end, making updating and maintaining the websites easier. Ultimately, this will result in a more efficient and effective use of City resources in training and maintenance and a coherent brand across various City websites.