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Hispanic Canadian Arts and Cultural Association

Supporting the development of local Latin American and Hispanic artists in Canada

Hispanic hero image

The Hispanic Canadian Arts and Cultural Association is a non-profit charitable organization that supports the development of local artists, including musicians, visual artists, performers, and others interested in Latin American and Hispanic music and culture. 

HCACA approached us with an ambitious project to build a platform to showcase Hispanic Canadian artists. The platform was to include a public facing site that allowed users to search events and artists as well as a portal for artists to build and manage customized profiles to be seen on the website.  


Background

At the time that HCACA reached out to us they were running a static website that relied heavily on text embedded into images. The focus of the association at that time was primarily through communication through YouTube and Facebook.  


Goals & Objectives

  1. Design a clean and intuitive website to showcase artists and events 
  2. Build a seamless registration process into the site that included an application process. 
  3. Allow artists to add custom built front end “widgets” to their artist profiles. Allow users to edit and save their profiles without publishing them.  


Challenges

Design: the new website was to balance the associations brand with the variety of work that was to be displayed on the site. 

Registration / Application Process : the registration process involved a 5-step application process where prospective members submit content to be reviewed by HCACA staff. Once submitted the data was stored in the User’s application and an email containing the information was sent to HCACA administrators to review.

Artist profiles: The biggest challenge of this project was to build a member management piece that allowed artists to login, edit, preview, and publish their profiles.  


Scope of Work

Our Approach

A Fresh Design

We followed our six-step methodology with an extra emphasis on the design phase to take the extra time needed to develop a clear and intuitive interface that balanced the HCACA brand with the art displayed on the site. To accomplish this, we used a lot of whitespace and did not rely on distracting graphical elements to make the design work. It is important for the website to showcase the artist's work and not distract away from it.   

HCACA of Sitemap


Registration / Application Process

The registration process involved a 5-step application process where prospective members submit content to be reviewed by HCACA staff. Once submitted the data was stored in the User’s application and an email containing the information was sent to HCACA administrators to review.  

[Check back soon for a visual of the registration process] 

If the prospective artist were accepted, staff would then manually trigger a complete account email by enabling the user in the User’s application. The complete account link would then include a link to create a password to navigate to their profile pages to finish the set up. All the information that they had previously entered in the application process including username and vanity URL all prepopulated on their profile pages to make the process as seamless as possible.  

 

Artist Profiles

Artist profile screen shot

The biggest challenge of this project was to build a member management piece that allowed artists to login, edit, preview, and publish their profiles.  

One of the first decisions that had to be made was to understand from a UX (User eXperience) perspective what information should be included on an artist profile page and what information should be found on the account information page.  

Account information included: artist name, bio, location, discipline, social media links, password reset, as well as delete account.  
 

artist administration screen shot


Whereas edit profile page was to mimic the look of the published artist page and consisted of a series of “widgets” the artist can use to showcase their work. In some case we included some descriptive text and a link to the account page to allow the artist to know exactly where they can edit the content of their profile page (bio text for example is shown and edited on both the account and edit profile pages).  


Artist Profile Widgets

The variety of artists necessitated the need for different “widgets” to be included on the edit profile pages. These widgets were to be individually added, edited, and saved by the artist. We built flexibility into the use of these widgets because of the variety of media and the variety of artists required flexibility (a visual artist for example might not need to use the video or audio section). The widgets we included are: 

In order to manage the artist profile page we also included an option to “preview,” “publish” and “unpublish” profiles so that artists can save their profiles and publish them when they are ready to go live on the site.  

Results

The cultural association has received extremely positive feedback from the community. Artists are reporting that the site is intuitive, easy to use, and they appreciate the simplicity of the design. The association staff have expressed gratitude for easy management of applicants and site.  
 

Site of the Month September 2021   
 

The new website was awarded Kentico Site of the month and scored almost perfect straight A’s with webpagetest.org.
 

Site testing score of performance

 

Project Details

The new Hispanic Canadian Arts and Cultural Association website was built with best in-class Kentico CMS which has recently been rebranding Xperience DXP (Digital Experience Platform). The new website features a refreshed brand, much-improved design, total overhaul of the information architecture, easy to use and reliable search all powered with an easy-to-use enterprise class content management system. 

Visit Hispanic Canadian Arts and Cultural Association 

Hispanic Canadian Arts Association

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