Award-winning guided mountain adventure company
The Brief
Mountain Tracks were looking to take their website to the next level.
Mountain Tracks' primary requirements were:
- To maintain a strong brand image.
- To give visitors a good impression of the available activities.
- Make it easy for people find and book trips.
- The ability to update the website easily and regularly.
- Reduce the need to duplicate information, both on the site and in the content managment system.
The Design
The first stage of the Mountain Tracks project was to establish what infomation is to available on the website and how each bit of infomation related to one another, we did this by building an entity relationship model. The next part was figuring out how to display this infomation on the website and how the user will navigate around. Once this framework was established we then started on the graphical styling of the site.
Strong branding was essential, along with clearly designed navigation elements and page layouts. To keep the whole look of the website legible and uncluttered, clean typography and graphics were designed for menus, headers, links and page items. Cool colours help the header and the left and right columns to sit back from the website's content. This helps to differentiate navigation elements from content and really show off the site's great photography.
The homepage is a strong example of this and gives visitors an immediate taste of what Mountain Tracks does. It showcases four trips that Mountain Tracks is currently running - with the top trip getting more exposure than the bottom three.
Browse - The New Search
Don't you just hate search systems implemented on most websites? After typing what you are looking for you and waiting for the result to come back from the server, you often get a lot of links which are not relevant to your search. For the Mountain Tracks website the client wanted a search feature that allowed people to easily and quickly find trips.
Our solution was the Trip Browser. It works by streaming all the trip data to the client's web browser, allowing them to perform real-time searching and sorting of the data without having to wait for the results to come back from the server. Check out the Trip Browser.
The Implementation
Vertigo was set-up to manage the website data model. By default Vertigo exports raw XML data, so XSLT templates were written to assemble the final web pages. In all, 17 different data types were built using Vertigo, along with 20 XSLT page templates. Pages are generated in compliance with XHTML 1.0 Strict and following WCAG guidelines. All content images are automatically scaled, cropped and exported by Vertigo. A neat addition were Mod_rewrite rules along with a bit of smart scripting to keep the website's URLs clear and predictable.
A staging - or 'preview' - web server was set-up on which changes made using Vertigo are reflected immediately. Once the website administrator is happy with the content on the staging site they can choose to publish the changes to the live web server.
For Mountain Tracks the benefits are clear. We delivered a modern, standards compliant, accessible, scalable and manageable website solution. For Vertigo it sets a new benchmark - demonstrating that you can easily mix content management, cross-linking of information, accessibility and standard compliance, along with tidy code and URLs.