An urgent need for a web build

The inaugural Impact X Summit, hosted in 2024 by St. Francis Xavier University (StFX), brought together students from across the Maritimes to learn about entrepreneurship and pitch their social impact venture ideas to a panel of entrepreneurs and community organizations.

The Impact X team needed a quick and easy solution to get a website promoting the summit up and running — and they knew if they went through the StFX IT Services department, the project would take too long. While the team could have set up something on their own, the result would have been a simple landing page rather than a robust website. So they called on Aurora for support.

Scope

The Impact X team wanted a WordPress site to showcase information about the summit, including its events and sponsors.

An events schedule was needed to show the speakers/moderators and sponsors for each event. This page had to be filterable by date, session stream and session type. It also had to be easy to update and maintain in the WordPress backend.

A sponsors page was also needed to showcase all the sponsors of the events. Similarly, a speakers page was needed to list all the speakers at the summit, with a sub-page for each speaker to provide more information about their background and experience.

Finally, the site required a registration form so students could sign up to attend the summit.

Branding

Because StFX already had its own brand guidelines that had to be followed, overall branding wasn’t in Aurora’s scope of work. However, it was determined that the Impact X Summit needed its own logo.

The Impact X team originally wanted to use AI to generate the logo, but found that nothing created by AI would meet their needs. Aurora’s designers came up with a variety of logo options for the Impact X team to choose from.

CMS build

Wireframes, mood boards and UI designs were not created for this project. This is because the Impact X team had to follow the existing StFX brand guidelines and also because Aurora already knew what would be required from a web development perspective based on a previous project completed for another similar client.

Aurora’s dev team simply needed to adapt some of the previously built website functionality for the needs of the Impact X Summit, then apply the StFX brand guidelines on top of it. This allowed for rapid development with very few issues or obstacles, making it possible to get the site live quickly.

Outcomes

The client was thrilled with the fast turnaround time and the more robust functionality of the website compared to what could have been done using internal resources.

One of the biggest pieces of positive feedback was that the summit had the best website out of any comparable student event. As a result, the Impact X team quickly enlisted Aurora to help out with the 2025 summit, with plans to make additional iterations and improvements to the site.