Background

Canadian National Brand Site Re‑launch
hallmark.ca
Completed June 2020
MHz Design (Partner)

Without the budget for a dedicated in-house development team, Hallmark Canada relied on the team at their US head office for updates to the national site for the Canadian market.

They were in need of a solution that offered more flexibility to manage site content, local promotions, French translations, and the ability to theme the design seasonally.

All while staying within strict technical requirements set by the US-based head office IT team.

What we did

Fullstack Development

Our agency partner delivered the desktop designs and handled the content development, which allowed us to focus on implementing all the technical features Hallmark Canada was looking for.

Home Page
Brand Page
Store Locator
Christmas Promo Microsite
Blog Page
Retailer Page

Cutting edge technology

We recommended that the site be developed as a Jamstack site. Jamstack sites are fast, secure and easier to scale; all things that were vitally important to getting buy-in from the US head office.

We utilized a headless Craft CMS backend, with a statically generated NuxtJS frontend. The site was architected to make use of a continuous integration / continuous delivery pipeline and deployed to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform that the Hallmark US team was already using.

Craft cms nuxtjs azure

Walmart Holiday Microsite

Hallmark Canada partnered with Walmart for a holiday microsite driving customers to purchase an expanded range of products online through Walmart for the 2020 holiday season.

Since the site with built with a headless content management system and component based design, it was a relatively painless process to develop a secondary site in a fraction of the time it otherwise might have taken.

Holiday site

Deliverables included

  • Translating the desktop design for responsive screen sizes (widescreen + laptop + tablet + mobile).
  • Designing all animations and page transitions.
  • Development of a store locator that ties into all of Hallmark Canada’s branded stores as well as over 3,000 additional retail partner stores that have Hallmark products available for sale.
  • The store locator automatically updates store hours and contact information from two external sources (a proprietary store database and Google Places).
  • Regional promotional offers and coupon listings for both Hallmark Gold Crown stores and select retailer partners.
  • A blog style section for videos and inspiration content celebrating gift giving, families, and holidays.
  • Making all content available in both English and French and managed through a single CMS interface.
  • Entirely AODA + WCAG2.1 A /AA compliant.
  • Seamless deployment within a rigid hosting environment dictated by Hallmark head office in the US.