Canadian Flavors Website Design and Development

The Consulate General of Canada in Detroit teamed up with Media Genesis to create a new platform called Canadian Flavors for two of the Canadian Consulate General’s initiatives: Canada Innovates and Ideally Canadian.

Canada Innovates selects Canada’s trend-forward, high-quality food manufacturers who have shown continued innovations in nutrition, ingredients, processing techniques and packaging to manufacture leading-edge products.

Ideally Canadian showcases purpose-driven companies who value the people and practices that support the production of high-quality food and beverage products.

The Consulate General of Canada in Detroit wanted to create a website that would highlight these two initiatives and include a filtering system that would allow visitors to search for the products that best match the visitor’s needs, allowing for a growth of economic development and foreign direct investment for the Canadian agricultural sector.

Stage 1: Analysis

Media Genesis met with the Consulate General of Canada in Detroit to discuss the goals of the project which included:

• A clean looking interface
• Two company catalogues, one for both Ideally Canada and Canada Innovates
• A filtering system to allow users to identify companies that meet the users needs
• A way for users to reach out and connect with the companies

Once these goals had been identified, the Media Genesis team worked to find solutions to each of them. Our team mapped out the user flow and sitemap for the new website. This was shared and refined with the Canadian Consulate General.

Stage 2: Design

This project required three unique criteria for design. The first was the need to give equal weight to each initiative. The second was to create a clean, intuitive layout for the filtering system. Lastly, the design team needed to create a layout for each company’s page that would allow for both a standardized layout as well as the customization of information.

To achieve the first criteria, the design team developed a sliding header that would expand to take up two thirds of the space when hovered over. This solution allowed for there to be a short description of each initiative while driving home the importance of both.

To meet the requirement of creating an intuitive layout for the filtering system, Media Genesis chose to use a left-side menu that would allow users to select a category. From there, the appropriate company would display as results on a company card. These cards have the basic information of the companies and can be clicked on to view the company’s page.

The need for flexibility on the company pages was addressed by designing a standardized layout that allowed for custom content, including company logos, to be inserted on the page.

Stage 3: Development

For this site, WordPress was selected as the CMS platform. One of the main reasons for selecting this CMS was because of the custom filtering system that the Media Genesis team developed. This custom solution allowed for there to be three main sections: “categories,” “attributes,” and “channels”. Under these sections, there is no limit to the filters that can be defined, and one filter can be selected from each grouping, allowing the user to reduce the companies listed and find what the user is looking for in an efficient and user friendly way.

The new Canadian Flavors website is a clean, easy-to-navigate, and informative website that allows distributors in the United States to connect with agricultural companies based in Canada. Media Genesis is excited to continue working with the Consulate General of Canada to further refine the website into 2021.

Along with the government of Canada, Media Genesis has also done work at all levels of US government from Federal to State and Municipal levels. In addition, Media Genesis has worked for the Italian Government, the Japanese Government, the United Nations and UNESCO. For more information on Media Genesis work with NGO or Government entities and programs, contact us here.