Travel Agency Website
The travel agency is a small business seeking to update its website. The requirements are:
- A modern looking website to give visitors a good first impression.
- An easy to use Content Management System (CMS) so that office employees can update most content without coding knowledge.
- Multilingual website with contents in English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.
Solution:
- Designed a responsive html5 template for the site that use familiar navigation elements that adjust to the screen size, with unique stylings.
- PHP and mySQL are used to build CMS and site generation. PHP as a high level managed hosting platform offers a large number of competing providers, and allows the website to run without technical maintenance. PHP’s speed and scalability is not critical to this website as the contents are static and not visitor specific, caching can be used very aggressively when needed. However, a fully static website is ruled out to support a build in CMS.
- Specifically modx CMS is used. It is not something that I have used, but I do know there is a large number of PHP based CMSs, and implement the management of a website for non-technical users is not something I want to build from the tools and frameworks that I have programed in before. Modx was chosen after evaluation of many alternatives on: userbase and project maturity, support and documentation, features and target audience. Modx is not the most popular CMS, but with enough users and existed long enough to have many evaluations on the web for me to trust its quality. The documentation were also clear enough for me to see the structure of the CMS and that the customizations I needed are doable or even foreseen by the authors. Although the target audience is vague on the main site (a general problem for …everything, the answer is always along the lines of we do everything from A to Z). Advocacy video tutorials that specifically demonstrated small customer facing business websites really sold modx.
- The contents are separated into English and Chinese sections, with a link between the English and Chinese versions of the same pages, presented to visitors below the navigation bar. Traditional Chinese is machine translated in the browser by javascript from Simplified Chinese when the option is selected (at 169 KB and an array lookup per character the impact is negligible for an image heavy website).
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