Sector(s)
A lightening-fast website for a busy retail hub.
The Shops at Santa Anita is a "super-regional" shopping mall located in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia. At 1.5 million square feet, it draws in customers from a wide area and despite the growth of online shopping, this is a mall that is booming. In late 2022, the mall’s previous owners, the Westfield Group, sold it to a local buyer for $537.5 million, one of the largest US mall sales in recent history.
As the new mall owners came in, they discovered in early December 2022 that their existing website (owned by Westfield) would be shut down by the end of the year. This necessitated the development and launch of a new site in less than a month.
This site presented a fantastic opportunity to build a decoupled site (decoupled explained here). The timeline was tight so we went with a two-phased approach to the problem: first, build something basic and fast. This first phase was a single-page site that could communicate basic information about the mall, like hours of operation and so on. To save time in development, we eschewed the content management system and instead went with a Google spreadsheet as a back end, coupled with a Next.js front end, with the spreadsheet’s cells functioning as content fields pulled into the front-end design.
About the project
- Develop and launch a new site in less than a month
- Make the site's more sophisticated content easy to update
Why Drupal was chosen
After successfully launching this temporary site just in time for the old site’s January 1 shutdown, we launched Phase Two of the project, continuing with decoupled solution using Next.js but with a Drupal CMS back end to make the site's more sophisticated content easy to update (read more about "Next-Drupal"). This Next-Drupal solution allows us to make updates to the design without worrying about rebuilding the backend. It's flexible, powerful and fast. See for yourself!
Technical Specifications
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Key modules/theme/distribution used:
