Canadian Cannabis Clinics

About the project

Background

Canadian Cannabis Clinics is one of Canada’s leading providers of medical cannabis access and education. They offer in-person services, with multiple locations around the country, as well as virtual appointments.

PROJECT AIMS

This project aimed to refresh the Canadian Cannabis Clinics (CCC) website, with updated branding, new pages to educate visitors about medicinal Cannabis, and to promote CCC's physical clinic and virtual services. Another key goal of development was to achieve an AA WCAG accessibility rating.

PROJECT SUMMARY

As the project manager for the Software Engineering team, I was responsible for ensuring the smooth development of the website. However, I also helped in some of the front-end tasks, as well as providing QA for new features and fixes.

While the previous CCC website was using Wordpress, we decided that we would use our internal React boilerplate to build this website, and connect it to the headless Contentful CMS so CCC's marketing team could manage the content on the website without our intervention. The website was also hosted using AWS S3 buckets.

Through the course of the project, I managed 2-3 developers who worked on this website. We worked extensively to ensure the website achieved the WCAG AA accessibility rating, using a variety of methods such as automated testing tools as well as manual QA testing and validating against WSAG's guidelines.

While we encountered hurdles during development, the result speaks for itself, with a robust website that modernised the CCC brand while increasing the accessibility rating, a key metric for healthcare websites.

Project Challenges & Lessons Learned

One of the biggest challenges for this project was planning the content model for Contentful. This website is one of the largest developed by Aurora's Software Engineering team, so we had to think carefully about how to organize the content types, as Contentful has limits on the number of content types you can have, without an enterprise account. The challenge was to keep the number of content types down while ensuring the CMS was usable by the CCC Marketing team.

After some prototyping, we settled on an organization method for the page content and began work. However, the pandemic forced us to rethink our model. As COVID had forced all of the clinics to close, the company had to switch to virtual appointments which resulted in a number of extra pages that were required before we could launch. These pages were not initially briefed, so we had to redefine our content model to be more flexible to allow for the new pages.