Cecile Park Conferences

London based Cecile Park Publishing wanted a website to advertise and sell passes to all of their Law conferences from one place. Previously, every conference had a separate website build and required a significant investment of time and money in order to produce. The aim of this website was to allow conference organisers at Cecile Park Publishing to be able to create their own microsites for conferences complete with color customisation, branding, registration page and an e-commerce checkout that linked to Cecile Park Conferences secure trading account. I designed and developed the site as a solo project using Ubercart and Drupal 6 and delivered the site and training within deadline.

Roles: 
  • Drupal configuration and deployment
  • Drupal custom site specific module development
  • Drupal theme development
  • Design (flats in Photoshop)
  • Custom JQuery for slideshow and Ubercart ordering
Challenges: 
  • Ubercart multiple delegate signups
  • Outlook ical generation
  • Multipage microsites using a single node (CCK multifield)

Ubercart to the rescue

The site was built in Drupal 6 using Ubercart to power its store. The client had a strict requirement that the payment gateway be SecureTrading and that coupon codes and discounts could be created easily for events if necessary. Setting up Ubercart to work with VAT as well as coupon codes in the way that Cecile Park Conferences required was a challenge in itself as was creating an extension to allow the signing up of multiple delegates in a single 3 step process. The entire checkout process had to be simple, painless and integrated - something that was easily achieved with Ubercart modules and Drupal.

Straight forward and clean

Cecile Park Conferences home page

The emphasis of the design and development of this website was to enforce a straightforward, clean and corporate image whilst allowing the varying character of the individual conferences to shine through in the banners and images. The London skyline stock photo was chosen and purchased by Cecile Park Conferences and Drupal driven testimonials are overlaid on top to create a distinctive and memorable visual style. Cecile Park Conferences also wanted to expand their mailing list with voluntary subscriptions which multiple areas of interest using an existing system for collecting and storing email addresses. I played a duel designer and developer role with this project allowing me to focus on delivering a solid and practical website in a minimal amount of time.

Create a microsite
(in less time than it takes you to read this)

Prior to creating this website, Cecile Park Publishing would hire developers to create custom ASP driven websites for each conference with checkout features and individual designs. This created delays in turn around time, unnecessary expenditure and distance between the various law conferences that they ran. Using Drupal I created an easy to use process for creating conference microsites which was as easy as adding a new node. Colours and a banner image can be added to each microsite and a navigation menu is automatically created for each page created in the microsite. The authoring experience was a huge focus of this project and using the Rubik admin theme and ckeditor it was possible to deliver a simple and process to admin staff at Cecile Park Publishing.