Discover a travel portal with a difference at addictedtotravel.com. A dynamic online meeting place for enthusiasts of experiential, adventurous and responsible travel. A website providing a service for people with a passion for travel who explore the most amazing places on planet earth. With easy navigation, comprehensive destination guides, colourful maps, and rapidly growing user-generated content, addictedtotravel.com enables independently-minded travellers to communicate and transact directly with travel specialists and quality product providers through our bespoke enquiry system.

A wealth of travel knowledge, local expertise and first-hand traveller experiences can be shared by contributing feedback, blogging, rating and reviewing products, forum interaction, chatting or posting images of the world’s most remarkable places. Our intuitive search engine enables pinpoint browsing from a growing choice of destinations, great places to visit, local attractions, trips and tours, great places to stay and a range of inspiring activities – all promoted directly by (and booked directly with) local travel specialists and product owners.

We are very excited to announce the launch of the Dragoman website www.dragoman.com

Dragoman offered us a fantastic opportunity to show what we could do in terms of design and development with this site designed to reflect the adventurous and friendly nature of their overland adventure tours.

This was a challenging build, with some important time-saving requirements at the back end and the opportunity to show off the social media possibilities of our CMS system.

Featuring:

• Full community functionality with user Photo galleries, Videos, Groups, Twitter integration, Facebook Connect, integrated short listing and booking process
• Advanced faceted search running from SOLR indexing system
• Trip reviews
• Integrated with multiple backend systems
• Webservices provided for both sides of the integration
• Full HD videos / You Tube integrations
• Full online booking
• Merchant services integration
• Internationalisation with multi currency and the possibility of a multi lingual site serving different content to different locales
• SEO built in, with Meta Tags, Titles and Headings all fully controllable from the CMS
• Easy management of tour information with editing of tour information from the front end
• Integration with third party supplier information via an XML feed
• Image management with no resizing or optimising required
• Cross selling, upselling and merchandising
• Ability to target registered users with targetted emails based on their online behaviour
• Huge location database producing a large number of  targetted landing pages

We are very proud of this website - please take a look!

Explore Worldwide had a requirement to rebuild their website which was built on an old CMS system and didn't provide them with any opportunities for future growth or modernisation. We have worked with Explore for a number of years, so we were delighted to take on the mammoth task of moving their current system over to a more open framework for future development.

With an extremely tight timescale, and with limited budget we created a highly bespoke solution for managing the content on the website whilst bringing the content of their Trip Notes, which were once stored as Desktop Publishing Files into a database, which has significantly reduced the amount of work involved in the creation and maintenance of these files. The system generates these using a PDF creation tool meaning the latest information is always available to the end user in whichever format they prefer.

SEO is key in the highly competitive Adventure Travel Market, so we developed highly optimisable landing pages for all of the tours, and an optimised framework for the static pages, which has meant a significant uplift in traffic from non-branded seo terms and the long tail with as little effort required from staff as possible. In addition, the use of related articles (based on keyword) around the site brings the content into the products and vice-versa, improving both customer experience and SEO potential.

We also manage the hosting of Explore's website, using multiple dedicated servers, and load balancers, the site is able to cope with the significant amounts of traffic placed on them. Unplanned down time has been negligable with redundancy built into the system and effective techniques for managing the roll out of code employed.

The website delivers industry leading conversion rates, and online bookings representing revenue in the multi-millions of pounds.

Technologies Employed:

• Joomla! CMS core
• PHP
• MySQL
• SOLR Indexing (providing faceted search)
• PrinceXML PDF generation for trip notes
• Geo Location for providing relevant content
• Multi Domain, Multi Language content
• Load balanced Apache servers
• Social Media Integration
• Content + API integration (for news feeds)
• Agent Community functionality
• Google Map integraion
• Advanced custom image management
• Advanced Caching
• Bespoke Online Booking system
• Outbound API for feeding holiday information to travel agents
• Linux (Development / Production Servers)
• ANT (Build Scripts)
• SVN (Version Control)