Ican Models & Talent

19 May 2021

Ican Models and Talent is an agency based in Queenstown. Servicing the local and international film and television and print industries. This was the 4th iteration of their site we've done over the course of almost two decades. Each one standing on the shoulders of the last.

3,500+ Models
60,000+ Images

Key Elements

Some key elements had been identified that needed to be addressed in this build.

Mobile friendly
The last site was built just prior to this being a must! Now it sits happily in a responsive framework.
Search Engine Optimisation
Always room for improvement here, the target never stands still.
Image management need to be improved
Now a user friendly rapid drag and drop interface with a CDN backend.
A Models right to be cleany removed from the site
This involved making sure not only their page disappeared but also all images.
Better PDF generation of head shots.
Completely redesigned layout and real-time PDF generation process.
Tighter integration with Mailchimp.
As Models are added/removed/updated, so is Mailchimp. This saves manually managing the list in Mailchimp.
Finer filter and search capabilities.
Now uses the power of Apache Solr along with custom post search filtering magic.

One of the larger challenges faced was moving the images to a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This allowed the image hosting to be managed and delivered off the primary webserver. Normally the logistics wouldn't have been that great, but in this instance, Ican had over 60,000 images to move. Most needing renamed and resized at the same time.