Beyond Travel Blog

The beyond travel blog is a place showcasing curated edits of the world's most beautiful destinations, travel tips, and inspiration.

Newmarket Holidays wanted to further expand their plethora of rich geographical-based content by providing a dedicated area where their writers could tell stories and express themselves in more creative ways.

Great, but how did the website come about?

Newmarket Holidays already had a pre-existing blog website which was hosted independently of their standard website environment. But for the purpose of ease of content management, reduction in costs and maintenance, fewer security risks and better capitalisation on SEO gains, the requirement arose to move the blog directly to the main website. While this was the primary goal, It was also time for the blog to receive a much-needed branding and UI/UX refresh. I had full creative control over this process but liaised closely with the content writers themselves to ensure that the final site was tailored to their needs and provided them with an environment they felt part of and would be proud to showcase their work on.

WordPress to Umbraco

The aim was to rebuild the existing WordPress blog website along with its features and integrate it directly into the primary Umbraco CMS. By doing this the company could ensure that all content was housed in one location, and that content could be re-used and linked to in multiple places allowing them to capitalize on content strategies.

The website itself needed to sit within the current CMS but act much like a standalone website. As the blog provided a completely different look and feel it was important the implementation was done in such a way that they behave independently of each other. This resulted in amendments to the core site routing configurations so that each site respected its own global error handling and page not found requests.

To replicate the majority of the WordPress blog features as close as possible to a .NET environment I had to utilise many different approaches ranging from Lucene/Examine searches, custom routing and route hijacking to the creation of virtual pages for tagging and category searches. This resulted in a fluid user experience that closely matched the pre-existing site but with no dependencies on external sources/libraries.

The blog itself was built from the ground up with optimisation in mind. We wanted to ensure that the overall page-by-page resource sizes were kept as minimal as possible, with extra attention being given to managing DOM size, reducing unnecessary dependencies and image size optimisation. The outcome far exceeded expectations with massive improvements to page speed resulting in consistent scores ranging from 85-100 on mobile and 90-100 on desktop.

The result

A complete branding refresh, in addition, to a complete site rebuild and integration directly into the primary environment. Allowing for improved content management, optimised page speeds, less maintenance and overall an improved company workflow.