Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Launched Jul, 2008
Colonial Williamsburg Resort
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
With more than 1,000 guest rooms, ten restaurants, and 66,000 square feet of conference space—complimented by superb spa offerings, a world-class golf course, and exquisite shopping opportunities—the Colonial Williamsburg Resort is a premier east coast destination.
In late 2007, we began working with Colonial Williamsburg to create a compelling website that would focus on the distinctive resort collection.
The Design Concept
We collaborated with Colonial Williamsburg in a series of discovery meetings to create a navigation architecture focussed on the resort guest. The navigation had to be simple and obvious, strongly promoting five major components of the resort collection, while providing access to a wealth of other content. The layout followed suit, channeling guests first and foremost to the resort’s core offerings, clearly reflecting the distinctions of each.
Technical Implementation
Design
With the design concept in hand, we created semantic XHTML/CSS templates. Typography utilizes sIFR for unobtrusively implementing specific fonts widely unavailable, without excluding users. Likewise, Flash components use swfobject for unobtrusive object embedding. Both degrade gracefully, with alternate web-fonts for type and images and text for Flash.
Drupal Implementation
We recommended Drupal for the website. Colonial Williamsburg already had some experience with Drupal, and was interested in continuing with the platform. In particular, granular permissions management, a robust theme layer, and the ability to potentially share content with other websites or services were features of value.
The Drupal implementation relies almost completely on core and contributed functionality, making heavy use of the views and CCK modules. We created a custom theme to accommodate the design, and developed several helper modules to supplement existing features (for example, the ability to order file attachments by weight).
