The Godinymayin Yijard Rivers Arts & Culture Centre project was a much needed one. With the exisiting setup not secure, optimised or conforming to an established site structure, this project was wide ranging in scope and time consuming with the migration of over 300 pages.
First up was to trawl through the years of inconsistent and incomplete content to see what the key points to focus on for developing a better site structure. Once this was devised, the Exhibitions, Events, Venue Hire and Shop were given primary focus. The governance and staffing information would be consolidated into one single page.
Custom post types and custom fields were added to allow for custom content filtering and indexing. Exhibitions would be split across the two floor spaces, the main gallery and K Space. Events would be categorised into the type of event they represent. Finally, a news section would be established to allow media releases, news, job postings and other non-core posts to have a place on the website.
The project was also built with future development in mind, with eCommerce functions setup to allow for future event ticketing. Currently, the centre uses a third party and is charged for each ticket purchase. Bringing this in-house, reduces costs and allows for the website to continue to build customer trust and return visits. Initially, an RSVP system is in place with payment functions ready to be enabled.
Once the site structure and formats were designed, the arduous task of migrating over 300 pages of content from the existing Drupal website could begin. This process could not be automated, due to the fact that the content was previous published inconsistently and with much vital information missing, such as exhibition start and end dates. Hours of research and sourcing old programs to validate the information was required and many hours later, the majority of events and exhibitions as far back as 2013 were added to the new database.
On completion of the development phase, the website was kept on a much more stable and secure server to reduce the risk of data breaches with the in-house server. Using modern tools and services allowed the website to function much more efficiently and be delivered globally at scale.
Ongoing work with the project has included ongoing technical support and major SEO work to undo years of neglect and the lack of optimisations on the previous website. The SERP and Pagespeed results have improved dramatically since the new gyracc.org.au website has been live.