Need to Know

  • It was essential for the new CN Tower website to highlight the uniqueness of the 360 Restaurant, Edgewalk, and the CN Tower attractions while creating a cohesive digital experience.
  • The new interactive digital experience is available in multiple languages and features integrations of the Tower’s lighting colours, parallax scrolling, a sunset clock, and Instagram and live video feeds.
  • Northern used Google’s Lighthouse development tool to test and improve the CN Tower’s front-end web performance score, ensuring swift load times for users on any device.

Client

Located in the heart of the Entertainment District, The CN Tower is a quintessential Canadian experience. 

Brief

The CN Tower project involved building a new digital experience to address the needs of three distinct attractions. The project aimed to highlight the uniqueness of the 360 Restaurant, Edgewalk, and the CN Tower experiences.

Challenge

The CN Tower sought to transform how its organization was perceived and experienced, guided by its mission: “Elevate every moment, celebrate infinite possibilities.” The new digital experience required updated content and a responsive, mobile-first design to encourage residents and tourists to return following Ontario’s re-opening during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project aimed to enhance the user experience, provide consistency with the Tower’s refreshed brand positioning, and ensure continued legislative compliance with accessibility standards.

Strategy

The team at Northern developed a tailored approach to build an exceptional website experience across each critical business unit—the CN Tower, 360 Restaurant, and EdgeWalk. Recognition of the differences (and similarities) in the audience types for each business unit was integral for complete digital transformation. The team implemented a visual tour experience of the CN Tower's attractions and amenities through the Explore The Tower page descending from the topmost location to the base. Users can browse an accessible catalogue of the CN Tower’s offerings using simple scroll or keyboard interactions.

Since site security was critical, the team selected Acquia for its best-in-class reputation for security out-of-the-box. Having servers located in Canada meant an extra layer of safety for the CN Tower website. Additionally, the website uses the Layout Builder and custom components for core pages to give the authors more control over the site, such as site sub-section branding, which alters coloured components depending on the core section rendered. Reveal animation is also found throughout the primary pages, creating a content flow to add elegance to the browsing experience.

The new multilingual website boasts many unique features, including parallax scrolling, a sunset clock, and live social media integration. Northern also enhanced the CN Tower’s front-end web performance score with Google's Lighthouse development tool. Users can now experience rapid load times across all devices.