Case Study
Hightech for Hygge
Facts & Figures
Company information
- Founded in 1967.
- VisitDenmark is the national tourism organization in Denmark working with international marketing of Denmark as a travel destination, as well as national and international coordination and analysis work.
Challenge
- How do you gather it all? Seven Danish wonders, 30 tourism authorities, 78 destinations, hundreds of content editors, 30,000 tourism products, 40 million users and 10 million tourists – all gathered in one multisite portal solution with more than 80 associated websites designed and developed with focus on both good design, usability and high performance. This was the challenge that VisitDenmark faced.
Services
- Strategy consultancy
- UX
- UI
- Usertest
- Web Development
- Solution architecture
- Technical consultancy
- Continuous Development
Technology
- Decoupled Drupal 9
- Symfony
- React
- Varnish
- Memcached
- Redis
- Percona DB
- Nginx
- PHP
- Cloudflare
Impact
- 60+ website launched in one month
- 80+ websites and 250 domains in total
- Exceptional load speed
- Easy release of new sites
- Translated into 15 languages
- 50% increase in pages views
Ulrik Lerche, Digital Platform Partner from VisitDenmark
Challenge
7 Danish wonders, 30 tourism authorities, 78 destinations, hundreds of content editors, 30,000 tourism products, 40 million users and 10 million tourists – all gathered in one multisite portal solution with more than 80 associated sites designed and developed with focus on both good design, usability and high performance.
VisitDenmark came to us with the wish to connect 40 million users with hundreds of internal content providers. And also to reduce the load time to zero, whilst using large images and videos to showcase the wonders of Denmark. The portal had to be aimed at a large number of target audiences - both internally and externally. So the project becomes quite impressive when you take the dimensions into consideration.
When travel bloggers, city marketers, cultural professionals, museum operators, gastronomers, hotel operators and many more work on content for the same web solution, you will quickly get a lot of content - and also the need for overview. On top of that, all content needed to be translated into 15 languages for a worldwide audience. Plus, when 3.5 million monthly users from all over the world look at this content, the requirements for this kind of tourism portal become pretty clear.
Approach
The integration of huge amounts of data was an exciting challenge to our developers. Because we wanted, that all work in the backend of the website should result in a seamless and intuitive user experience in the frontend. Technology like feeds from third-party providers for the provision of events, partner lists, weather forecasts, widgets for hotel bookings, etc. therefore needed to step in the background.
We follow a good Scandinavian tradition when we say that technology should be useful. This is also the case here: the goal of all efforts is the perfect user experience - for all target groups, on all devices, on all subpages, with all third-party solutions and in all 10 languages. As the previous version of the VisitDenmark platform was no longer able to meet the increased requirements for performance, security and user experience, it quickly became clear that a modern multi-site solution was required that offered an architecture that would withstand the growing demands.
The creative process started with the development of a visual concept, then a concept for the whole website solution and subsequently a detailed design. The process of developing both information architecture and design took place in a close collaboration with VisitDenmark's project group in 5-day design sprints, each ending in wireframes and design elements that could be tested internally and externally. The division of the process into design sprints allowed both us and VisitDenmark to be able to focus on the details, while keeping an eye on the overall experience of the product all at the same time. We took care of the planning and the facilitation of these design sprints.
Results
The redesign of VisitDenmark's new site is far more contemporary and visually appealing with great pictures and inspiring videos of Denmark's gems. At the same time, the site has become more user-friendly and much faster, making navigation easier for visitors. The VisitDenmark solution is built in Drupal 8 and continued in Drupal 9 CMS with a decoupled React frontend – an implementation that has impressed the worldwide Drupal community since our team solved a lot of issues with the React implementation. Some of them being preview integration enabling editors to see the React view of the page in admin in mobile and desktop view, an increased performance, and an optimized SEO setup. The VisitDenmark platform is delivered lightning fast worldwide via a content delivery network. Internal scalability is achieved, among other things, by the CMS architecture, in which data storage and processing are strictly separated (decoupled CMS). This means that the work on the portal can be carried on many shoulders - worldwide.
Impact
The new multi-site tourism portal solution moves VisitDenmark’s online presence to the 2020's with a lightning fast, modern and futureproof editorial platform. The new websites load much faster than on the previous portal, give the editors more freedom to create and maintain content, and the portal is more secure and easier to update with the new release model introduced in Drupal 8/9.