Cheeky Monkey Media is a web development agency specializing in Drupal and WordPress development. We pride ourselves on our ability to create custom, responsive, user-friendly, and visually appealing websites. Our team of skilled developers and designers work closely with our clients to ensure that their specific needs and goals are met. We believe that a well-designed website is key to a successful online presence, and we are dedicated to helping our clients achieve their desired results.
Cheeky Monkey Media is a web development agency specializing in Drupal and WordPress development. We pride ourselves on our ability to create custom, responsive, user-friendly, and visually appealing websites. Our team of skilled developers and designers work closely with our clients to ensure that their specific needs and goals are met. We believe that a well-designed website is key to a successful online presence, and we are dedicated to helping our clients achieve their desired results.
About Big White Ski Resort Just 56 kilometres away from Kelowna and the sunny center of the Okanagan Valley, lies Big White Ski Resort, the third largest resort in BC. Big White is one of North America’s premier mountain destinations.
They have been operating since 1963, when owners Cliff Serwa and Doug Mervyn installed the first t-bar lift on the hill. Over the next 22 years, Big White Ski Resort saw the first lodgings constructed as well as a number of new chair lifts installed. In 1985, Big White Ski Resort was bought by the Schumann family, which led to the start of rapid growth and change. By 1996, Big White was Western Canada’s largest on-mountain village with over 5,500 people.
Now, in 2020, the resort is bigger and busier than ever. Big White is proud to be the home of 16 lifts, 3 hotels, 25 condo and townhouse complexes, 244 vacation homes and cabins, and a ski-in ski-out youth hostel. While you’re staying in one of their many lodging options, you can choose from a variety of different activities beyond skiing. Now open all year-round, there are both Winter and Summer activities from ice skating, dog sledding, snowmobile tours to downhill mountain biking, hiking, and much more.
Big White, Big Site As a major tourist destination, Big White’s website receives a lot of traffic every day. Similar to owning a car that puts on a lot of miles, Big White’s website needs continuous maintenance and enhancements.
In 2017 Big White needed a web development partner that could work alongside them to provide timely maintenance, improvements, and upkeep.
Their previous website had been designed and developed with another agency, and the team at Big White wasn’t happy with its performance and results. Cheeky Monkey Monkey Media was the perfect partner to step in and help manage the website through ongoing iterations.
Planning, Programming and Enhancements, WebOps. As we began to work with Big White, we introduced the WebOps approach which included a collaborative team to address and resolve the issues being experienced.
A comprehensive site audit was recommended and conducted, allowing us to understand the website and performance. Based on those results, developers and designers were able to make recommendations that would improve site performance and user experience (UX). This would directly impact the results they were getting, aligning with their high-level goals.
The WebOps team worked with Big White on several user experience enhancements and innovations. We created a development road-map that focused on achieving their goals while adhering to their quarterly budget constraints. The roadmap consisted of several projects as well as ongoing improvements and enhancements.
Drupal 8 Enhancements Big white needed help enhancing their Drupal 8 website through ongoing iterations and security updates. WebOps was the perfect fit to push forward with the website goals while iterating through gradual enhancements. Regular releases of completed development modules worked within Big White’s budget and timelines, allowing the WebOps team to act quickly on smaller improvements while rolling out larger projects.
To begin, the team focused on ensuring that all Drupal core security and module updates were completed in a timely manner. Due to the size and traffic volume of the site, ensuring security and stability was a paramount concern while additional features and improvements were being introduced.
Enhancements included:
Implementing a modular page-building system so Big White could quickly and easily create landing pages through a flexible system. Refactoring the site search, as the previous search function was returning errors and slowing down site speed. Implementing geo-forwarding on the homepage to direct visitors from different parts of the world to more relevant landing pages. Improving the responsive design to ensure the site displayed correctly on the right devices.
Managing Robust Improvements While these enhancements were being developed, we continued to work with Big White on larger improvement projects within their WebOps plan.
Telus Optik Integration
In October 2017, Telus Optik TV was being implemented at the resort. As a bonus, Telus offered to stream resort webcams, weather, and run conditions from the website to a local on-resort channel within Optik TV.
This required our team to work with Telus to set up the data from BigWhite.com in the form of RSS feeds, and converting the data to an appropriate format for Telus to receive the information. Working within an ambitious timeline, we updated and provided feeds for all nine webcams. Content within the feeds refreshed every 5 minutes, ensuring that mountain goers received the latest updated information.
Webcam Improvements
As well as the work done to allow for Optik integration, Big White wanted to update their webcam layout. This update would improve the usability of the webcams on both desktop and mobile.
The update included moving from a single column layout to a two-column layout, and building out a pop-up feature with horizontal scrolling.
Header Reorganization
Big White wanted to update their website navigation for both summer and winter - the user experience was not intuitive for either season. Big White wanted the new navigation to be more user friendly and include better search functionality.
Cheeky Monkey Media worked with Big White to put together a design and feature list that met all the functional requirements. This included updated logo placements, toggle features, reworking existing navigation items, adding new menu items, and adjusting the search feature’s placement and functionality.
Accommodation Improvements
Big White was looking to update the accommodations experience on the website. They wanted to redesign and develop the accommodation filtering systems, add better location information within the system, and implement a favourite list.
Our team worked to create an intuitive experience for both first-time and return visitors. The filter system was updated to allow sorting accommodations by visitor needs. This included the creation of two main filters that visitors could use:
Buildings Type Features Rooms Room Type Each filter allowed visitors to customize their results based on their ideal accommodations.
Big White also wanted to see the accommodation information updated and redesigned, so our team added updated maps to show visitors where their accommodations would be located on the mountain. As well, we updated the unit detail page to show other recommended and available units. And finally, we implemented a ‘Favourite’ list that would allow visitors to add a list of preferred units and have quotes provided for their selection.
About Gordon Food Service Starting as a simple egg and butter delivery service, Gordon Food Service has grown to be the largest family-operated food distribution company in North America. They work with restaurants, schools, universities, healthcare facilities, hotels, stadiums, and many other businesses.
Over their 120 years of service they have evolved with their customers’ demands to provide a variety of solutions. In addition to food delivery they provide product training and consulting to help their customers – from how to best manage their delivery schedules to providing advice from chefs and dieticians.
They currently employee over 20,000 workers across the USA and Canada.
Annual Celebration Gordon Food Service Annual Celebration 2019 required a reskinning and updates to their existing website. The purpose of the website was to inform GFS employees of the upcoming event including the event schedule, entertainment, and other relevant information.
The annual event was renamed from Annual Meeting to Annual Celebration which required a new domain name. All existing links to the original site would need to be redirected to the new domain.
Serving up a New Look Working with the GFS Celebration team our designers and developers reskinned the website to match the artwork and branding of the upcoming event. The project included creative design, creation of new elements, and replacing assets.
After the event a link to a survey was required to gather feedback from guests to better inform their future events.
Collaboration In order to ensure that no existing data was lost, Cheeky Monkey worked closely with the CBS team to create a plan to determine which fields were new, existing, or related, between the new PPRP form and the existing blood case forms. This was broken down into a spreadsheet that both teams had access to.
Interactive Prototyping For this project, Cheeky Monkey’s UX designer took the lead, attending calls twice a week with the CBS PPRP team to ensure that even the smallest of details hadn’t been overlooked. Ensuring that the prototype gave a real workflow feel was of the utmost importance. This meant showing all options in the various dropdowns, and showing how the conditional logic would work when specific items are selected. The prototype for this form ended up with 66 artboards to show the functionality, and if you were to look at the connections in the file? Well… let’s just say it gets a little insane.
Accordions We solved the lengthy scrolling by using accordions for each of the indication categories throughout the different sections. This allowed for users to open and close them freely as they went about filling out the form. This ended up significantly cutting down on the size of the page as users could open and close them freely whilst filling in the information. This also allowed for users to view all their selections at the same time, if there were multiple indications present within that case.
Transforming what was previously a clunky manual process for the case managers into a digital process has increased the team's efficiency when filling in and submitting the form.
Cheeky Monkey loved working with Canadian Blood Services' PPRP team, and look forward to continued improvements within their medical case management system.
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Location
777 Hornby St,
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 7786540124
2280 Leckie Rd,
Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada 8888243359
Key clients
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