Multi-million pound turnover travel site Olympic Holidays was built on an old version of Umbraco - version 4. For such a traffic-heavy website an update to a newer version was vital. Our Gold Partner Offroadcode took that challenge. During the process they developed multiple packages for this solution and open-sourced them. This is a fantastic example of true open-source spirit. No wonder this case won the Jury’s choice award at the Umbraco Awards 2017!
Skills used
- Design
- Content Creation
Sector
- Tourism & hospitality
The boarding
Olympic Holidays needed content to run their website and supplement their booking engine. It’s the usual website pages, thousands of hotels, differing terms and conditions, many integrations and tens of thousands of images. This had to be a total rebuild of an old v4 build of Umbraco that the clients hated into a newer v7 build that they now love.
We, Offroadcode, aimed to turn what the client called "Umbraco Face" from a frustrated frown into a beaming grin.
Our main goals were to:
🌴 Ease the administration burden by rethinking the structure and adding smarter property editors that “make sense”.
🌴 Improve the backoffice speed as this was really becoming a productivity drain.
🌴 Improve the general day-to-day editor experience so finding and editing content is easier and trouble free, and appears on the frontend instantly rather than after a 24 hour lag.
🌴 Enabling easier development of future features by having a better foundation to build up on.
🌴 Bring together many additional data sources (spreadsheets, XML look up files, additional database tables, etc.) into one place to store and edit them once and for all.
🌴 Plus the small matter of completely redesigning the front end from the ground up while integrating it into a separate booking engine.
The flight
The client had an existing Umbraco CMS (not built by us, but selected on our recommendation) which was a replacement for an aging bespoke CMS that was long past its sell by date.
However the existing Umbraco build was a straight copy of the existing bespoke CMS and did very little to fix the original CMS’s shortcomings or maximise on the “goodness” of Umbraco. If anything it showed off some of the worst of Umbraco and had given the client a bad impression. Very slow back end, broken core functionality due to incomplete upgrades and very little to make a nice “editor experience”.
We knew that Umbraco would be a fantastic fit for the client. They had already used it, they had a feel for it, so would need only limited retraining.
We did though have to win them over on Umbraco again. Showing off some of our other builds and v7 helped get sign off.
The nicer UI certainly helped and our examples of how we can make the backend more productive and the opportunities to customise it to their needs with custom functionality sealed the deal. We expect the site to have a life of 5 plus years before the backend gets rebuilt again, so we needed a robust CMS with a strong future and the ability to grow with the client’s needs. Umbraco seemed the obvious choice!
"I don’t hesitate in recommending Offroadcode's skills. We’ve worked with Offroadcode for a number of years. They were a great help in getting our website up and running, and assisted us with many new features,"
The destination
The biggest gain that the client has had is an increase in available editor hours due to the improvements in the setup of the backoffice.
Editing no longer takes so much time (dead time waiting for pages to load or trying to find things or having to edit one field on each content item one at a time) so they have more time to spend on enriching the content, ensuring it is accurate, up to date and engaging. These are all activities they wanted to do but the answer was always “where will we find the time?”.
The new back office not only frees them up to do these tasks but encourages them to do the right thing in a fun way. The redesign has increased the conversion rate by 23 percent and this is at a time when the advertising budgets have been tightened so more is there we believe once marketing tap is opened up again.
Why and how it flies
We’ve done quite a lot on this build and released (or are in the process of releasing) a lot of the things we did as packages. Some of the packages we used/created are:
✈️ EditorNotes: allows us to embed instructions about a doctype right there in the editor, when to use it, how to use it, examples, etc.
✈️ Bulk Editor: allows editors to select which content items they want to edit, select the fields to edit and then edit all the content in one place, with paging to make it sane. Think of updating stock quantities for lots of products all in one place.
✈️ Sortable Media: allows editors to drag and drop the ordering of images in media folders. We link to a folder of images for each resort (rather than select many images for every resort as the media section is better at managing...erm...media). But after launch the client wanted to be able to sort the order of the images quickly. The built in method is slow so we wrote a drag and drop sort (and released it). Winning.
✈️ Text over image: easily allow our editors to build nice page banners with text overlays. Move the text around and resize the banner as needed. See the video for a more in-depth tour of some of the goodies we’ve done.
Umbraco is such a good editor experience out of the box.
It does an amazing job of helping the editors to do their job while allowing us to supplement that experience with an amount of customisation (which Umbraco makes easy for us too).
"Umbraco no longer makes me angry!"