Yarmouth Mall

3526 Highway 1, Beaver River, NS - Yarmouth area

902-307-1956

Website redesign

Portfolio: Website – Yarmouth Mall

Challenge

client’s existing site was a one page text list of stores with website & phone# info for each

Strategy

enhance the site’s visual appeal, and include a floorplan of the mall to make it easier for new visitors to find stores.

Implementation

theme: found a theme framework that provided the building blocks to put together a custom structure.
photos: took wide-angle photos of the mall’s exterior, including a central shot that had the main mall sign prominent in the foreground. Also took a few interior ones.
store listings: it was a unique challenge to try and strike a good balance between presenting all the info users would likely wanted, without over-cluttering this section. Found a commercial module that lent itself quite well to these demands. It offered:
- auto placement of store logos in rows and columns; adjust automatically to different screen sizes
- categorization, so that users could filter down the list of stores by clicking on a category.
- ability to store phone, website, and facebook links in popup boxes.
floorplan: based on the plain-lines floorplan used by the mall, set up a vector-based graphic floorplan in CorelDraw, and placed store logos over their locations – or close to them with arrows. Found a WordPress module that provided a way to use Google map technology on a large graphic, which let me create a floorplan section that scales to mobile devices, and users can pan/zoom just like a google map.
seo: did extensive research into the mall’s online presence in directories, maps, etc. Claimed/updated listings where available, to improve google brownie points
facebook feed: the mall’s facebook page has a lot of fans, and gets a substantial amount of views each month. A live feed was added to the website, to maximize the ability of the site to display the latest facebook posts.
domain/site costs: after looking at the client’s current domain/hosting package, found a more cost-effective solution with the same parent company that gave more features, at half the cost.