CoolNewMedia recently participated in a re-design of the CanadianHomeFind.com website where we worked on a team to port the old site into a Drupal powered solution.

The previous CanadianHomeFind.com was dynamic however it did not have any content management in place so all text changes had to be installed by a web developer.  One goal in this redesign was to install a content management solution, empowering the marketing team to make updates while also freeing the developers from content maintenance requirements.  Drupal was chosen as it is a solid, mature, well supported content management system, and secondly, Drupal can be easily extended to manage home sale listings, retail listings, and other content types.

For this project, our primary role was to:

• Source and recommend a CMS solution to power the new site.  Drupal was the best choice here.
• Develop a Drupal theme from a graphic comp provided by TheNewMediaGroup. We actually built the new CanadianHomeFind theme as a sub-theme that extends off the ZEN theme framework.
• Setup the base Drupal site including navigation menus, blocks, etc.
• Recommend and install modules to help power the solution
• Setup the content editor role so that the editors could update content
• Work with other designers and developers to create a solution that met aggressive timeline requirements.

The current online version of CanadianHomeFind.com was developed in under three weeks. Our involvement in the project began Aug 28 and the new site launched Sept 14th.

CanadianHomeFind.com is currently in a hybrid configuration as much of the home listing data, accounts, and other dynamic features are still contained in the old code (not enough time to port/migrate all this to the noew system) however the new site "fronts" this display.  The next phase of development includes moving all the data and functionality of the "cart" side of the site into Drupal.