Sector(s)

Team Members

i_g_wright, sawtell, alickmighall, adam_b

Project Team

Alongside Tara, Craig and Matt client side we also worked with Fran and Ruth at Osomi on the design and Adrian at Preori, who provide the CRM.

Visit the site

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Organizations Involved

Ski Safari run two sites to support their business: skisafari.com which covers their ski tours business, and freedomtreks.co.uk, which sells cycle tours across Europe.

Ski Safari were the UK’s highest rated ski tour operator in 2014 and 2015. To maintain this reputation they needed a website which truly showcased the tailor made ski tours they offer and present their brand and ethos to customers.

Freedom Treks sell cycling tours around Europe. As they are not the exclusive distributor of these tours, it is essential that they can offer a better level of service than their competitors to maximise bookings. An improved website would help them achieve this.

The two sites were finalists in the 2016 Acquia Engage Awards.

About the project

Goals

Prior to this relaunch, each of these sites were hosted separately, on different proprietary systems, each connected to a central proprietary CRM via some very clunky methods.

The relaunch objective was to redesign both sites and manage them under one system, as well as explore the benefits of using an open-source CMS.

Requirements

One of the primary focuses for both sites was to deliver a responsive layout with an enhanced UX compared to the existing site. Working to new designs, we implemented a faceted search which better highlights product offerings, which then link to improved product pages. Based upon the user’s selections, a quotation form passes customer leads onto the client’s CRM system (proprietary software, which had no API at the start of development) via an integration. CRM integration was also required to collect additional required booking information and crucial customer satisfaction ratings following the customer’s trip. Improved editorial workflows were also needed so their internal team can easily create SEO friendly content. This is was done primarily in the form of a page builder and media library which allows their editors to reference existing content and add new content of predefined types using a drag and drop interface.

For Freedom Treks an additional challenge was how to deal with a portfolio of complex tours. Many of the tours they offer have a number of variants, so traditionally these have been very difficult to sell and manage online. The new site includes an online booking process which captures all these variants, creating a key differentiator amongst competing operators. The development of the new site also went hand-in-hand with a redesign.

Outcome

  • Reduction in manual processing, eg sending data to the CRM
  • Simplified editorial operations – previously two entirely different systems, now largely the same structure
  • Long technical future available – previous systems were approaching end of life in terms of technical support
  • Fully responsive sites
  • Solr search for navigation and filtering as well as traditional search
  • 2016 Acquia Engage finalist

Traffic (Feb 2017 vs Feb 2015, from Analytics)

  • SS: users +40%, sessions +27%, goal completions +70%, time on page +50%, mobile use +98%
  • FT: users +40%, sessions +46%, goal completions +22%, time on page +90%, mobile use +214%

Why Drupal was chosen

miggle proposed that not only could each of these sites be managed in Drupal, but that a core code base could unify both, sharing resources across brands and reducing maintenance and hosting costs in the long term. Choosing Drupal as a solution also allowed Ski Safari to benefit from everything open source code has to offer: full control of the code, no supplier lock-in and access to a global pool of developers via agencies, contractors or in-house teams – depending on their preference.

Technical Specifications

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Themes

Both sites are built off the Bootstrap 3 grid system which is included in the miggle Bassline theme (https://www.drupal.org/project/bassline). The reason for choosing this framework is so that we only include the grid and no styling, from this it can be easily extended to meet requirements for the project.

Ski Safari: Custom theme built based on designed created by Ski Safaris in-house team which uses the Bootstrap 3 grid system. The site is 100% fluid to react to all screen sizes.

Freedom Treks: Custom theme built based on designed created by Osomi which uses the Bootstrap 3 grid system. The site only includes 2 breakpoints, desktop and mobile.

Modules

Ski Safari and Freedom treks use Drupal in a multisite way, allowing the codebase to be shared but have separate themes. Due to this it helped reduce development times for custom modules / feature which are shared between the sites.