Croatian National Tourist Board is a national tourist organisation founded with the purpose of creating and promoting the identity and reputation of Croatian tourism, planning and implementation of the common strategy and the conception of its promotion, proposing and implementation of promotional activities at home and abroad of common interest to all operators in the tourism industry, and improvement of the complete Croatian tourist offer.
For their existing business website that has originally been built using a proprietary content management software dating from early 2000s, the decision has been made to switch to Drupal. Websolutions Agency worked with Croatian National Tourist Board to migrate all content and to make it happen on Drupal 8. The biggest challenge following the discovery phase was the 30 day development deadline for launching a beta version.
Drupal was chosen because it is:
- ideally suited in situations where requirements may evolve
- open source, thus cutting the licensing costs
- supported by a large community
- powerful and robust - the website receives large traffic
- easy to integrate with external systems
- trusted and proven solution
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The main goals were to:
- migrate all existing content from a proprietary CMS to Drupal
- restructure the content
- create a better information architecture
- improve on UX and design
- improve on responsive design / mobile-first design
- complete the beta version in 30 days
Discovery
An initial discovery phase was conducted to confirm the project requirements and goals, and to agree upon the objectives, scope and budget ranges of the project. The resulting documentation was later fed into the UX and design of preliminary wireframes.
Information architecture
After reviewing the existing information architecture, Websolutions Agency worked on the new, optimised one.
UX and design
Focused on creating more intuitive user experiences Websolutions Agency used some of the best practices when creating a modern, mobile-first design that works on any device regardless of screen size. Because of inadequately structured content that needed to be regrouped in different sections, a decision was made to make use of Paragraphs module.
Migration
Full data migration of all the existing website data and functionalities from a proprietary CMS platform was a requirement (reverse engineering) and a custom migration module was written. However not all content could be automatically migrated due to the fact that the existing content was unstructured and inconsistent. A lot of manual editing needed to be done.
Relaunch
Beta version of Croatian National Tourist Board was relaunched on the 31 December 2016. project was finished by the end of January 2017.
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
-
Paragraphs - provides the most suitable way for merging differently structured content that needed to be migrated from the old website
-
Pdf to ImageField D8 - a custom module that provides automatic conversion of uploaded PDF files to images. It was used for the creation of image thumbnails from cover pages of PDF files.
- Webform - provides the ability to make a large number of customised surveys for end-users to fill out for which Webform was a more suitable solution than creating content types and using CCK or Field module
- Webform Views Integration - a custom module for exposing Webform submissions to views
- We also created a custom module for migration from proprietary CMS to Drupal 8
