VANCOUVER—A west coast digital agency went below the surface to come up with a new website for the city's public aquarium.

SmashLAB designed a new site for the Vancouver Aquarium, a project that took about six months, said the lab's creative director, Eric Karjaluoto. The agency has done some work for Tourism Vancouver and other public tourism organizations, which is likely how smashLAB landed the contract through an RFP, he said.



The aquarium wanted an easy-to-use website that also conveyed its commitment to a conservation and research facility, said Karjaluoto. "Most people think the [aquarium] as just a destination, an attraction and that's where the story ends," he said, noting visitors come to the site for different reasons. "I think we built out 14 user scenarios to look at all of those instances and how to work around them."

But the site also had to be simple enough for those just coming for a quick hit of information. The hours of operation and other vital info is now in large type [the main font on the site is GGX88] on the homepage. "On the old website, you had to dig for hours of operation, and they were microscopic," he said.

Buying tickets and directions are now in plain site on the homepage, as is a link to the aquarium's conservation efforts.

Sorting content to put on the new site, including photos and videos mainly supplied by the aquarium, was a huge job, he said. "I believe there are around 1,500 to 2,000 pages of content for the initial site," he said. "We had to cull every page, using a massive spreadsheet. I think we were able to pull that to under 500 pages of content."

A link to an "AquaBlog" is now also on the homepage. "They were [previously] using a bunch of different technologies, some were treated like blogs or news, we amalgamated them into one feed ... like a magazine of sorts."

While it was a huge project, the client helped the process run smoothly, said Karjaluoto. "The [aquarium staff] was really reasonable to work with. I have to say I was surprised by how incredibly rational they were. Challenges were posed but we could talk through them ... they are really bright people."


He added, "A lot of the heavy lifting is done by the fact that it's an amazing property to be representing ... it's a lot harder to make a law firm look breathtaking. We had a treasure trove of visuals to work with."

Also involved in the building of the site was the creation of custom icons; over 280 of them were built for the site in-house, said the creative director, who added with a laugh, "I think we made eight different killer whale icons."