Online Community
The best way to keep your customers interested and involved in your site is by creating an online community. Drupal facilitates forums, blogs and member profiles to keep your content growing, fresh and relevant.
The Seattle Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) is the leading professional association for architects in the Northwest. They run architecture events and classes, and advocate for design excellence. They had been managing a web site with many thousands of pages by hand for years. Bear Ideas spent several months with the management team to design, scope and draft business requirements for a new online system to support their organization.
The new web site is built on top of the Drupal CMS framework. It includes an installation of CiviCRM to manage all event registrations, Ecommerce 3.4 to support AIA document/contract purchases, a new Drupal/Flex search tool to locate member firms, a Job Board, full community tools support, and several subdomain sites for event submissions and a host of other tools. Bear Ideas has done all of the coding and customization, and also has excellent content management staff in-house that has been heavily involved in getting those thousands of pages migrated to the new site. This was important to maintain a strong presence in search engines that had been built over many years.
New branding & web design by Wolken Communica.
Coming into its 35th year, Ballard Seafood Fest is a great, old fashioned summer party. Bear Ideas ported this existing site over to Drupal so the staff at the Chamber of Commerce could easily update and maintain the site.
As with many event sites - it lay somewhat dormant til the week of the event, and then saw 10K plus visitors each day. Drupal was ready for that level of traffic spike - with a great built-in caching mechanism, event goers were able to get to the site and checkout all the great vendors and seafood!
Graphic design was done by Design Hovie Studio.
For over 70 years, Glazers Camera has been bringing the photographic community in the Northwest together. In 2008 Bear Ideas launched a new site for Glazer's using Drupal as the framework. The web store uses drupal ecommerce v3.4, and connects to their point of sale system for inventory management of more than 12,000+ products.
In addition to the store we used Drupal's "community plumbing" to start an online community for Northwest photographers. It allows their customers to build custom profiles to promote their services, link to flickr image galleries, and rate products. Blogs, forums and more are all in the works.
Graphic design was done by Wolken Communica.
In March, 2008 Bear Ideas launched the Project Origin Community site for Monolith Games/Warner Bros. This is for the new game following on the heels of their hit F.E.A.R. Drupal was a natural CMS choice to support this community, as it also powers many sites for WB's music division.
Bear Ideas setup a blog network for their developers, and custom user/member profiles. We also built a new age-gate module to meet ESRB requirements, a custom flash video player, and integrated their existing vBulletin forums.
Graphic design by Wolken Communica.
