The immensely popular mymacs.ca website is the brainchild of a collaborative effort between 612 Creative and The Jibe. 612 Creative owns the client relationship and provided creative direction on this project while The Jibe engineered the technical components of the website and maintains responsibility for support, on-going extensions and underlying infrastructure.
Mac’s Convenience Stores operate under two divisions: Central Canada and Western Canada. While branding and merchandise is consistent, each division runs their own promotions and contests, requiring separate web content targeted at each regional market. The initial site was specified and built for the Western division only. Now Mac’s wanted to extend it to include the Central division on the same back end to keep site administration simple and get the most out of their investment.
We overcame this complication by taking advantage of largely pre-existing functionality in Drupal’s multilingual support, effectively treating the divisional/regional separation as two languages. This approach enables both divisions to publish their own unique content ( that can still be shared across divisions ) and to have site visitors automatically directed to the content that matches their geographic location or user preference. The result? A system that is simple to use, easy to maintain, highly scalable, and very cost effective.
Mymacs.ca is a bold online retail statement, reflective of its audience’s lifestyle and needs. In just the first two months after going live, mymacs.ca attracted over 5,500 registrants, by the end of the first year that figure surpassed 35,000. Today there are more than 215,000 members.
Beyond the ability to create cross-division and targeted content, the new site marked the consolidation of Mac’s web properties. The advantages are obvious: a more cohesive message without sacrificing the distinctiveness of each region, lower total cost of ownership and a higher return on investment from Mac’s online presence.
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