Industry: Tourism
Type of Site: Major Travel Destination Portal
Website
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Web Applications |
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Client: Aruba.com and BC Pictures
Timeline: approx 2 months per year for 3 years
Budget: approx total $18,000 CAD over 3 years
Company Profile:
Aruba.com is the official government tourism website for the Caribbean island of Aruba. Aruba is one of the wealthiest islands and over 50% of its economy comes from tourism. BC Pictures is a Canadian digital media company that was contracted to build and constantly improve/maintain the website, product rich media photos and videos, and actually manage the island's complete internet strategies for attrating tourism within a fixed budget of approx $2,000 USD per month.
Problem:
BC Pictures has the resources and personnel to handle content production and design, but they do not have any in-house programmers to handle the increasing demand for dynamic web applications.
Solution:
Leveraging a few open source programs and libraries, we implemented all of the web applications running on Aruba.com to this day (more than 6 years for some applications). These applications include a Search Engine, a very high-traffic forum (100,000 posts per month), an e-Card system, a Business Listings Directory (like a Yellow Pages), a News Publishing System, and more. The website was also cloned in 7 languages, which involved duplicating all web applications for each language installation.
The website has since undergone several generations of re-design, but all of the applications we built are still in active use.
We also built a few companion sites,
including a dynamic photo library for professional travel photographers
(images.aruba.com) and a web portal for IAATA travel agents
(agents.aruba.com).
During the 3 years or so of our active relationship, we also provided system administration for managing several dedicated servers, including 2 web servers, 1 database server, and 1 mail server. The servers were migrated and upgraded twice during this time.
Canada