Topdeck Travel
Drupal 8 Migration
Full Audit of Existing Site
Improved Loading Speed
Brief
Topdeck Travel appointed Zoocha as their web partner in November 2017 on a project rescue basis to complete a website migration onto Drupal 8 that had stalled with a previous agency after 2 years in development. This was largely due to the previous agency’s inability to solve issues relating to integrations with key 3rd party systems and nuanced aspects of e-commerce functionality.
Project Goals
- Fix longstanding project bugs, and launch project using Drupal 8
- Increase online, direct from consumer sales, reducing reliance on and commission to 3rd party travel agents.
- Implementation of Single Sign On (SSO) across historical websites, apps and new website to maintain consistency across all digital platforms throughout phased roll out.
- Creation of a digital platform that could be used for Topdeck Travel sister brands, Back Roads Touring and Blue Roads Touring.
- Alignment of Topdeck Travel’s applications architecture with Group (Flightcentre)
Much of the codebase for Topdeck Travel had been custom coded by a previous agency, therefore Zoocha’s role was to audit and assess the quality of work, produce documentation where necessary and implement any critical fixes or amends to help support the swift launch of a platform that was both significantly over budget and late.
Solution
Working closely with the Topdeck Travel digital and design teams, Zoocha were able to deliver multiple complex work streams through increasing the scale of our agile development team to meet the client’s requirements. We worked closely with the key stakeholders to ensure we delivered a minimum viable product, suitable for launch in 3 months, that would allow Topdeck Travel to meet their project goals.
Key deliverables of the project included;
- Migration of the development, staging and live code bases into fully hosted and managed AWS infrastructure.
- A full and detailed audit of their existing, custom coded, Drupal 8 content and commerce website, creating recommendations for pre go-live recommendations development based on risk profiles, effort and costs.
- Re-architecture of entire commerce flow through implementing Drupal 8 Commerce to replace existing custom coded checkout process.
- Re-factor integration with 3rd party product and order management system to improve integration quality and performance.
- Create a forked version of the code base to launch 2 new e-commerce websites in 8 weeks, delivering a consumer facing proposition for the first time for sister brands Back Roads Touring and Blue Roads Touring.
Technical highlights
Zoocha are now working closely with Topdeck Travel to support, and continually release new features and functionality to their digital estate helping them to achieve their consumer strategy.
The key results for the project to date have been;
- Improved consumer conversion rate
- Improved site performance, reducing page load speeds
- Launch of Blue Roads and Back Roads, generating incremental sales
