Coach USA, one of the largest bus companies in North America, engaged our digital partner Iron Orchard to help them modernize and develop a responsive website designed for users on the go. As their technical partner, GeekHive was tasked with re-platforming their outdated proprietary CMS and supporting them through discovery to choose a CMS that would fit their current business goals and would also be flexible enough to adjust to changing future needs. They required a more robust system that could be easily managed and updated and could also offer enterprise-level capabilities to bring consistency to over 30 microsites on their proprietary system. Based on their objectives, we worked with Coach to choose Drupal 8 as the platform of choice.
About the project
As a transportation company, Coach USA’s consumers rely on a mobile-friendly system with the ability to quickly search and view schedules from their mobile phones. We are taking advantage of Drupal’s ability to lazy load images on the site to increase speed on mobile. When you are lazy loading images, they are not loaded until you scroll to them, in addition, Drupal has built-in handling for responsive images, a huge benefit not often found out of the box with other platforms. Different than fluid images (large images scaled with CSS), this handling automatically sizes the responsive images for the screen based on the width breakpoints significantly reducing load time.This saves data on a mobile phone, helps with bandwidth and doesn’t use visitor data.
Our Long-term Engagement Team is currently working with Coach USA to help them roll out the next phase of this project; bringing brand cohesion to all of their proprietary sites.
Why Drupal was chosen
We chose Drupal 8 for this project because it provides future flexibility to create multi-sites for various entities. Below is a list of some of the ways we leveraged Drupal 8 for this build.
- Drupal 8’s in page editing functionality makes things far easier, quicker, and more efficient for content editors by allowing them to click right on the content and edit on the page instead of using a back-end wysiwyg editor.
- Drupal 8’s Blocks are much more flexible than in previous versions, you can now attach blocks to several pages and easily reuse content across multiple pages.
- Drupal 8 is written on Symphony, so we were able to leverage various Symphony tools to take advantage of what's already been written.
- We are using Varnish on Pantheon to increase site speed, improve availability and ease the load of large amounts of traffic.
- Twig’s templating system is much more user-friendly for front-end developers and is less cumbersome for back-end developers to get front-end developers what they need.
- We used Drupal as the foundation to build a custom emergency notification system for the site. This enables Coach to notify travelers in case of delays or any other major issues that may affect them.
- We implemented a polling feature to gather customer feedback for Coach.
- We integrated Coach’s existing proprietary scheduling tool to their new site by creating an endpoint with the scheduling system that allows us to interface with and eventually roll it into headless Drupal.
With Drupal 8, the overall experience for content editors and the underlying experience of how you code is much more streamlined and far less cumbersome.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
We chose Metatag because it allowed us to automatically provide structured metadata to increase Coach's search engine optimization.
We chose Simple XML Sitemap because it automatically generates sitemaps and helped support Coach to reach their SEO optimization goals.
Slick Carousel was used as a simple solution for a responsive image slider.
Blazy was used in conjunction with Slick Carousel to lazy load images to save bandwidth and server requests.
In addition to the modules above, Coach USA had a unique set of business objectives that we needed to develop custom modules in order to support.
