Zero-to-launch in 2 months flat: Autos.ca was an intense, ground-up design effort to bring compelling automotive news and editorial content to a mainstream audience.
Start your engines…
When Autotrader wanted to reinvent recently purchased Canadian Driver—an automative news and editorial site, primarily for car enthusiasts—they set a lofty goal. Their mission was to define, design and build a top-of-mind online destination for a much more broad and mainstream Canadian audience looking to research, shop, and talk about new cars. The timeframe was highly aggressive: from start to finish in a little over 8 weeks, targeted to coincide with the 2010 Canadian Auto Show.
A new name in Canadian online automotive news and opinion
Working in an agile fashion, Teehan+Lax initiated parallel streams of strategy, information architecture, creative concepting and build prototyping. This multi-faceted effort was coordinated by a core team of planning, creative and technical leads working in close consultation with both internal client stakeholders and third parties.
A proprietary user segmentation and analysis served as a basis for the content strategy, prioritized functional requirements, and a fresh visual identity for the new site. Getting to working software as soon as possible was a priority from the start. This allowed us to work much more collaboratively with client-side IT resources performing the backend integration and content migration.
Eye on the prize
While time-to-market was a key factor for this project, we worked hard to ensure that the template and content system we delivered was highly flexible and scaleable, both as a publishing platform and from a monetization perspective. This last point related both to new opportunities for ad inventory and referral traffic to Autotraders’ marketplace through integrated, contextualized inventory modules.
