As the website manager for the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), I led the project for the re-design of the festival’s website.

The goals of the project were:

• Unify the three sub-components of VIFF (the Festival, the Film + TV Forum, and the Vancity Theatre) under one site and with common branding. There had previously been 3 different sites, each with a slightly different look and feel.
• Create an searchable film guide listing, a functionality that had been part of the previous online ticketing platform (TixSys), and integrate it with the new online ticketing system (AudienceView). We wanted to bring the film guide functionality into the main website.
• Allow us to take film information, managed internally via FileMaker Pro databases, and publish to the website and update content easily and rapidly
• Build a site that would serve as a good base platform for further development, including further integration with the ticketing system, and for mobile application development.

The project was done in an extremely compressed time frame (8 weeks), for a scope that would normally be done over several months, due to the requirement to get in done in time for the 2012 Festival (site launch by mid-August 2012).

My project responsibilities were:

• Select a Drupal development agency via RFP process
• Define functionality requirements for the site, and prioritize around a minimal viable product for the first phase of development.
• Work with internal stakeholders and the selected developers (Appnovation) to determine the functionality and information architecture of the site.
• Participate in the Agile development process – attend scrum meetings, act as the point of contact for developers’ questions, approve functionality as delivered, report bugs, approve fixes.
• Translate the business requirements from VIFF into technical requirements for the developers.

Website link : VIFF