Parks Canada Agency

The Client

Parks Canada is Canada’s national public agency responsible for protecting ‘nationally significant examples of Canada’s natural and cultural heritage’. This mandate encompasses the preservation of parks and historic sites as well as marine conservation.

The Challenge

The website for Parks Canada contains 34,000 pages. Until recently, all content had been updated by Parks Canada IT personnel, a time- and labour-intensive process given the size of the site and, during certain seasons, the spikes in its use. Parks Canada wanted to enhance the site’s functionality in a way that would improve content management while at the same time addressing new Common Look and Feel 2.0 (CLF2) standards mandated for all Government of Canada websites.

The SiteSystems Solution

Following a case study performed by SiteSystems’ strategic federal partner Cyberplex, Parks Canada opted to implement a content management system (CMS). A Sitecore CMS was selected, along with a MondoSearch search engine. SiteSystems developed a demo offering an array of possible variations for the web content under CLF2 guidelines, and one park’s website — Point Pelee National Park — was chosen to pilot the new solution. A large component of the project was the migration of the agency’s entire 34,000 web pages. This was conducted in a phased manner and, through the development of a customized migration process, circumvented the purchase of a commercially-available migration product, saving the client approximately $100,000 in project costs.

www.pc.gc.ca