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Background
Crystal Lake Travel Agency is staffed with Travel Professionals to help you plan your vacation getaway. They partner with multiple airlines as well as destinations to make the hardest part of your vacation a breeze. They have been recognized by many agencies for excellence and have been in operation since 1960. Specializing in honeymoons, they take care of the tedious part so their clients can sit back and enjoy one of the more special times in their life.
Understanding the added benefits having a website brings, SYDCON was brought in to design and develop a website from the ground up.
Objectives
Crystal Lake Travel Agency hoped to build an online representation for their company that would make advertising easier by increasing visibility while allowing online booking within the site. In order to make this happen, SYDCON was brought in to address the needs associated with a website's design and development:
- Custom website design
- Front and back end programming
- Information storage such as business description, staff biographies and help videos inside a database
- Site monitoring by employees via a CMS
- Shopping cart that would allow for online purchases
- Contact Us form
Methodology
ColdFusion scripting language processing was used in this specific situation.
Based on their desires, a descriptive proposal was created and given to Crystal Lake Travel Agency involving all information regarding their website and its design and development. The terms were accepted on both sides and the website's development was started.
Our development team of one lead designer and two expert programmers addressed this project with the steps necessary to craft a working website:
- Talked openly about site goals
- Asked for design preferences based on other websites our client enjoyed
- Designed the visual layout of the website according to the client's personal taste
- Developed a Content Management System that would allow non-technical users to update the website information
- Added a description of the company, their services, and their staff to a database that would be loaded onto the website
- Displayed the database content on the website after front end development was finished
- Client shown the finished product website
- Launched website with client's participation
Technical Approach
We utilized ColdFusion, CSS and HTML scripting languages to drive database content and make it capable of user interaction on the actual website. The previously mentioned database content was added to an Access backend to make it live on the website.
Results
Richard W. Doherty, Jr., president of Crystal Lake Travel Agency, says, "I am very pleased with the web site work you have done for me. As we discussed when we began this project, I was not looking for 'the lowest bidder' but rather value. Your timeliness, creativity and ability to satisfy my requirements by simplifying the process and saving me time...makes you very valuable to me."
- Crystal Lake Travel Agency is satisfied with their website that contains all desired functionality they outlined in our conversations.
- Navigation across the website's content is easy for site users as well as booking vacations through the site
- Non-technical users are able to make updates and changes to the website with our CMS
- Crystal Lake Travel Agency has seen a growth in website visitors since the publishing of their website
Continuous updates have been made to the Crystal Lake Travel Agency website as requested.
Our work with Crystal Lake Travel Agency can be considered a success because:
- Crystal Lake Travel Agency made sure that we understood what they wanted as part of their online presence
- A line of open communication between SYDCON and Crystal Lake Travel Agency kept the project error-free and on task
- The ability exhibited through all projects by our development team