en fi Home Cases Services About Careers Blog Contact 100 events – 1 platform Messukeskus.com Messukeskus is Finland’s largest and most versatile venue. They organise more than 100 trade and consumer shows and 1,500 meetings and congresses every year. Messukeskus needed a new platform to enable them to easily create and develop sites for these events. Evermade developed a flexible platform where each expo site has their unique identity but still retains the consistent Messukeskus.com structure. Visit messukeskus.com Services Art Direction Responsive Design Front-end Development Back-end Development Multisite WordPress CMS We wanted a website that we can flexibly use and customize ourselves. It is a lifeline to us as Finland's largest venue. Nearly 1.3 million visitors a year search our sites for knowledge, experiences and insights. Maria Mroue Marketing and Communications Director, Messukeskus The Challenge: creating a flexible & rock-solid website platform We needed to streamline the website management process with a new, modern platform that treats content as a first-class citizen. As each event site has specific needs and expectations, the tools to customize and configure the views on a per-page basis were paramount. Methods of presentation had to fit the content instead of forcing content into a predefined mold. As Messukeskus is a home to hundreds of events held every year, the extensive amount of content published on Messukeskus.com and it’s event sites would need to be structured in an understandable, coherent way. A well-planned and executed information architecture was essential in creating an experience that allowed visitors to find everything they needed without feeling lost in the sea of information. When a popular event was announced and held at the venue, the amount of traffic would often spike to very large numbers. A core element in this project was to ensure that the website platform would remain fast, efficient and functional regardless of traffic. The Solution: Hundreds of events on a single platform MOBILE FIRST DESIGN, NAVIGATION IMPROVEMENTS, BETTER INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE, SEO Due to the vast amount of content offered by the website system and all of the child sites, we started our design thinking from the site structure and navigation. The information architecture was carefully planned. Mobile optimization was a very important piece of the puzzle: it doesn’t just make the experience readily available to the vast amount of mobile users, but it also boosts the SEO of Messukeskus.com and all the event sites it powers. API INTEGRATION While WordPress and our homegrown tools offer a good content creation experience, additional avenues of data were opened by integrating the website platform with the Messukeskus API. This streamlines the management of event information, and automates the content creation by allowing event data to be brought to the website platform directly from the separate event management software. AD MANAGEMENT Messukeskus cooperates closely with their selection of partners, and needed a tool to promote them on a per site -basis. Our solution was a simple but effective advertisement management tool built straight into WordPress. It comes with an easy to use UI and powerful configuration options that allow Messukeskus to manage their advertisements at ease. BLOCKS AND CUSTOMISATION A lot of thought went into creating highly modular components that make up the Messukeskus website platform. Thanks to the block-based approach and extensive configuration options, each event site can be easily customized to match the look and feel of the particular event while still maintaining the carefully laid out architecture across all sites. SOMELOOP SomeLoop is a tool from Evermade that collects a relevant, embedded aggregate of content from select social media channels. As each selection of feeds can be customized to suit a specific set of filters, Messukeskus now has the ability to embed relevant, user-created content across all of the sites under the website platform. MULTISITE MANAGEMENT We developed a WordPress-based website management platform that allows Messukeskus to easily create and manage hundreds of dedicated event sites from a central hub. MESSUPOLKU In line with our efforts to enhance the overall user experience and information architecture, we created a tool that allows site visitors to search, filter and save information from events important to them personally. This greatly increased the efficiency of both the users and the platform, as all information would only need to be sought for just once. SERVER TECHNOLOGY To ensure the website platform would always remain accessible even during high traffic peaks, the server cluster is split between two separate data centers. Load balancers share the traffic evenly between the two physical locations. The outcome Messukeskus now has a website platform that enables them to easily create and develop sites for the events they host. The flexible platform allows each event site to look and feel unique while retaining the consistency behind Messukeskus.com. The end product greatly increased the speed of the website system, both in terms of technical performance and user experience. Visitors on the new Messukeskus.com are twice as fast in finding the information they are looking for, and they are over 50% more likely to continue exploring the site after their initial landing. >>CONTINUOUS ITERATION, CARE<< While the project has been a success for all parties involved, we are far from finished. Evermade is committed to continuous improvement through iteration, cooperating with Messukeskus to build an ever-better product. Have a similar project in mind? Let’s have a chat! Or call Julius +358 40 8252 741 Sel8nne Feb 09 Angry Birds May 19