Sector(s)

Team Members

alickmighall, xaviemirmon, i_g_wright

Project Team

The design was done by Steve Lester Design (www.stevenlester.com)

Entirety of the build by miggle.

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Round the world specialists, Travel Nation needed a new website to address issues with their Joomla powered site that were having a detrimental affect on their business:

The site architecture was limiting the ability to add new functionality, was not enabling integration with third party tracking scripts and most importantly was not offering an optimal customer user experience

The site was becoming increasingly unstable with a complex content management system (CMS) that often resulted in content managers breaking pages. Page load times were unacceptably slow for this heavily image based site

Image management was increasingly difficult without categorisation facilities as the library grew.

The “Round the World Flights” section was a separate and outdated Flash component that did not work on mobile. The preference was to consolidate this functionality into the main Travel Nation website

About the project

Goals

The new sites needed to be responsive and built with the same simple page creation, built in validation, live previews and tagging of content for cross-promotion as per the original build. They also needed additional workflows which allowed them to translate existing content whilst maintain global information such as flight information and image data. Creating multilingual content was a difficult challenge that they faced with their limited French and German resources, so a requirement was that we integrate further with some of their API’s to include multilingual/multicurrency capabilities.

Requirements

miggle re-built the RTW component using Google Maps (API3). Integration with a 3rd party app (https://developer.aero/) allowed for multiple stops to be added to the map, showing the exact routes of a tour.

Taxonomy has been improved, a complex categorisation exercise was applied along with the introduction of content tags that enable cross promotion throughout the site

Expanded categorisation to image library providing better search and management of assets.

Integration with third party scripts including the customer review site Trust Pilot

Multilingual integration with tour operator G-Adventure’s API. This integration provides a library of tours and updates pricing with minimal input required from content editors.

Outcome

After initial UK site build, ability to add sites for other markets, so now there are French and German variants too.

Travel Nation now have:-

  • A responsive site, that works on all platforms and browsers
  • A simple to use Drupal back end which democratises content updating and reduces training overhead for staff
  • Inbuilt validation to ensure accurate completion of all content before publishing and linking of similar destination content via taxonomies
  • A sophisticated image library management via taxonomies and tags to enable faster and better web editing

Why Drupal was chosen

With multiple content managers managing content, building the website and CMS in Drupal with its built in validations, simple workflows and customisable roles and permissions was an obvious choice.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Theming/Frontend:

For the front end we utilised the Twitter Bootstrap framework which provided mobile responsive utilities out of the box. To do this, we created a child theme of the Bootstrap theme for Drupal which we added our styles to.

Feeds:

Travel Nation required integrations with multiple industry standard API’s. To do to this we used the Feeds modules as a starting point for our API integrations.

SEO/Analytics:

Full ability to manage their on site SEO is something the client specified as a requirement from the start of the project. One of the main draws to using Drupal was the plethora of SEO modules such as metatag, xmlsitemap, and google_tag which allowed Travel Nation to fine tune how their website appears to search engines. To improve the analytics available to Travel Nation and further improve the SEO rankings, we added the ShareThis module to allow for users to share content on social networks.

Content editing and management:

Arguably the most powerful feature of Drupal is how it handles the management and editing of content — a very import feature to Travel Nation. In using the token and entity/entityembed modules, we gave them the tools to re-purpose or embed content from different places throughout the site. As an example, they now have the power to place a relevant product inside blog articles and update the prices centrally rather than having to update them across every place the product is utilised.

Travel Nation’s content is full of imagery which meant they required the ability to easily tag and manage their images. To do this, we built an image library with categorisation and search capabilities through use of the media modules. One unintended consequence to having such a powerful media library is that it gave content editors the ability to add so many images that we needed to use the lazyload module to ensure the site’s performance remained intact.

Search:

With the sheer amount of content and products, it was necessary to provide a powerful and easy to use search experience. For performance reasons, Drupal’s built-in wasn’t able to cope with the amount of data we were searching so we went with the apachesolr modules. For better UX, we created an experience similar to that of Apple’s spotlight using apachesolr_autocomplete allowing users to search content without ever leaving the page. We also implemented a faceted search solution with the facetapi modules to provide users with the means to search product on more granular levels.

Translations:

Apart of the original site build, there was always a requirement to have the site on different domains for EN/FR/DE. Originally, there was only a need for the EN site as the main source of content and a few landing pages on the FR and DE. Given the amount and types of content required for the FR and DE sites, this was suited towards using the i18n suite of modules. However, as the FR and DE markets grew, there was a need to translate fully the EN site to FR and DE including all of the API integrations. To carry this work out we added the entity_translation suite which gave the us more granular and specific data storage allow the client to have better control over their translations.