Aurora Investor Website

About the project

Background

Aurora is a Canadian licensed cannabis producer, headquartered in Edmonton.

PROJECT AIMS

This project aimed to re-build the Aurora Investor website, which provided information to current and potential investors, including press releases, up-to-date stock information, and other investor material.

PROJECT SUMMARY

One of my first major projects for Aurora, this new website was briefed as being a complete overhaul of the previous investor website, which was using outdated branding and did not feature enough information about the company.

I managed the project from initiation to completion, working with the Marketing and Investor Relations team during the development and beyond to ensure we met quality targets, and planned milestones.

I managed four developers who worked on this website, and I assisted in the development by taking on some of the front-end tasks when time permitted. I also took on most of the post-launch QA and small feature requests.

This was a high-profile website within the company, and while we were under pressure to complete the website within a tight timeline, we managed to launch the site on the planned launch date.

Project Challenges & Lessons Learned

One of the biggest challenges was the scale of the website, with a huge number of pages and thus, a large amount of content. All content would then need to be multiplied by two, due to the website featuring the ability to toggle between English and French.

Managing the constantly changing nature of the content was a big challenge, as new changes were being requested during development. As part of the project retrospective, a new copy deck format was developed to help track the changes of copy updates.

Another challenge was connecting to the newswire API to pull the latest press releases. While simply pulling the data was not a problem, we were tasked to have dedicated pages for each press release so we could share links to our website, rather than an external site. Using NextJS, we were able to build static paths for each press release being pulled from the API and display the correct content for each page.

This was also only our second time using the Contentful headless CMS, and due to the scale of the project, as well as our inexperience, we made some mistakes when defining our content model. This resulted in the team having to create a separate Contentful repo for the blog functionality which was later added to the site, as we had reached the limit of content types. Since we continued to use Contentful for further sites, our knowledge in content type planning ensured future sites did not encounter this issue.