Challenge
The Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) is the largest, most highly attended film festival in the United States. SIFF screens 440 films to more than 150,000 moviegoers in four weeks. Beyond the festival, SIFF screens movies year round at SIFF theaters as and provides ongoing film-education programs. SIFF's mission is to create experiences that bring people together to discover extraordinary films from around the world. Through the art of cinema, SIFF hopes to foster a community that is more informed, aware, and alive.
How do you update a website hourly with content to support hundreds of films, video trailers, show times, and other temporal content? How do you empower your audience to discover new films based on interests and other facets? How do you optimize the website experience for mobile and tablet visitors searching for screening and ticketing information on the go?
The challenge for SIFF was scaling website publishing to deliver an engaging website experience that is always up to date and promotes independent film to a web-savvy and increasingly mobile moviegoing audience.
Solution
SIFF selected Ingeniux CMS to power the new SIFF website. Ingeniux CMS provides the ability to dynamically update website content in real time. Ingeniux also provided a structured content platform to manage content and the metadata that helps make films discoverable by topic, genre, show time, and other attributes.
Ingeniux automated content creation by allowing SIFF staff to upload films directly from their existing film database. With a live connection to the back-office data, SIFF can generate film pages, assign categories from taxonomy, and build guided search and navigation indexes.
The website was built with an engaging responsive design template that optimizes content display for desktop PCs, tablets, and smartphones. The new SIFF.net website goes beyond standard responsive design by providing a "film finder" app for smartphones that simplifies film discovery. Filters—or, by their colloquial name, "SIFFters"—organize films by show time, program, or category. Using the app, moviegoers can quickly and easily find relevant films and screenings.
For SIFF's annual film festival, the site features a photo gallery built using Ingeniux Cartella social collaboration platform. With Cartella, the SIFF team can "photo blog" during the festival, engaging site visitors with exciting new content and festival updates in real time. This is essential to sustaining the buzz surrounding the festival, and maintaining that energy long after the month-long event has concluded.
At a Glance
- Ingeniux smart filters, or "SIFFters"
- Responsive web design with a fantastic mobile interface
- Up-to-the-minute festival updates (including photo galleries) via Ingeniux Cartella social collaboration platform
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