|
Brief
Audley Travel, based in Oxfordshire, UK, is a specialist in tailor-made holidays. Their business model relies heavily on the website – www.audleytravel.com - to inspire visitors to make contact, via telephone or web forms, with their team of 80 travel consultants. Working closely with customers the team helps them turn their dream vacation into reality and develop individual, highly-personalised itineraries to suit their tastes. The visual appeal of the website was so important that the business was manually managing an image library with tens of thousands of photos along with 4,000 pages of content. Audley wanted to substantially increase the number of sales enquiries initiated through the website. At the same time they wanted to introduce more automation and cross-referencing of content so that they could reduce that amount of time and technical know-how being spent on manually managing the library assets. They realised that in order to accomplish this they needed to bring the site right up to date by basing it on a state-of-the-art Web Content Management System (CMS) that could integrate the complex image library processes, better co-ordinate the relationship between different parts of the site and allow the day-to-day management to be handled by relatively non-technical people.
Strategy
The number one objective was to boost the amount of website generated sales enquiries thereby leading to a proportionate increase in conversion rates. To achieve this Audley worked with Web CMS vendor Sitecore to build a site that is rich in features and functionality.
The first part of the strategy was to integrate Audley’s own media library with their Amazon S3 hosted media library to allow images to be accessed to generate bespoke pages on the fly as visitors browse the site. The system had to allow any of Audley’s 180 staff to upload, label and rank images for delivering bespoke content. The system also needed to co-ordinate automatically with the online library so that the Web CMS could build and present web pages on the fly.
Secondly the new website needed to integrate seamlessly with a number of in-house built web services which are used to populate the dynamic areas of the site – including one for images, one for content held in their in-house reservation system, and one for live bookings data allowing customers to view their itinerary on line.
Another important part of the strategy was to enable to the site to automatically present content that is relevant to visitors’ local requirements, for example displaying the right country contact information for the incoming URL.
Execution
Audley selected Sitecore’s advanced Web CMS website platform for its flexibility, ease of implementation and rich array of features and functionality. Sitecore’s ability to keep content separate from its presentation (technical environment) allows Audley to quickly add special promotions to the site. New features and additions can be implemented much more quickly and easily.
Audley’s three image systems – its in-house library and the Cloud-based image system – have been integrated and Sitecore’s own Sitecore Media Library added to form a rich bank of visual content that is automatically generated and re-sized on-the-fly as a user browses the site. Any changes made by content editors on the in-house library during the day are relayed to the Cloud system overnight so that only the very latest images appear on the website.
With so many images in the library, Audley has also integrated a bespoke button in the media bar so that content editors can quickly search for a selection of appropriate images and pick the best one when creating bespoke content. Numerous additional buttons have been added to Sitecore’s ribbon bar to integrate with the in-house web services. There are buttons for importing data from the reservations system, for building special extension objects for use in template renders and for developing custom reporting screens for content control. An example of this is the ability to geo-locate an element of content (a hotel or a place for instance) from within Sitecore as it is added by the content editors using web services like Geo Names.
Although the site presents all content in English, the language functionality of Sitecore is able to produce geography-specific versions of Audley’s contact details dependent on the incoming URL. So a visitor in the USA will see a US freephone number and contact details. This is set up for the USA, Norway, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand & Canada.
Results
Since going live with Sitecore, the number of visitors to the website has doubled. The website is now fulfilling Audley’s objective of allowing them to process a lot more inquiries without increasing their resources. The website content is managed by a reasonably small team, half of whom are not technical.
Audley’s search engine partner was given access to Sitecore to work with the content editors to update page descriptions and content to maximise search engine performance
Since launching the new site in 2008, Audley has won 8 awards including:
- "Wanderlust Best Website 2009"
- New Zealand Tourist Board “Best Tour Operator Website 2008"
- Canada Tourism Commission “Best Use of Online 2008" and
- Travelmole Asia “Best Website 2008"
Traffic and enquiry levels have risen sharply year on year - partly due to the ability to turn around new content in a much shorter timescale than ever before.
Audley also attributed the awards to the amount of effort they put into providing high quality content on the site. To try to differentiate themselves from competitor sites they try to steer away from having lengthy vanilla descriptions, opting instead for an interactive magazine style with features on subjects of interest to clients such as how to plan a self-drive trip through New Zealand.
The website continues to grow as more images and, increasingly video, are added. Today the website has reached over 12,000 pages, yet thanks to the efficiencies introduced by Sitecore, is still managed by the same team of three content editors and two web developers.
|