portfoliodetail

We completely re-designed the old Solomon's Guide website and created a completely new customised back-end system in Contao to edit properties, locations and wisdom "bites".

Solomon's Guide is an printed booklet that contains approximately 600 properties all over Southern African continent.

The existing website was getting dated in it's look and feel, and also the data system wasn't providing Moja Media with the dynamic abilities that a CMS will provide. Since we've done a few previous projects together, we got tasked to design a fresh new look, based on their latest printed cover design.

Orange shades and some striping, create a stunning new web 2.0 look for the website. 

To facilitate the editing of the Properties, Locations and Wisdoms, we created a completely custom application for the client. Each property has a large amount of data that is stored and presented. Numerous grids of check data like Accreditations, Facilities, Interests, Activities, Environments, Conference Facilities, Languages and Attractions had to be re-engineered. Adding to that you can define seasons per property, units inside property (for different rooms or types of units) and each unit can have multiple prices for each of the defined seasons. All of this data was reengineered, then old data imported and remapped. We also added Booking information to link the Safari Now booking system into the site.

Then we created a completely new application to build a location tree. Each location can have meta data, GPS coordinates (to plot on the Google Map), type (country, province, city, suburb, etc.) and special text fields for sections like "Did You Know?", "Festivals & Fun", "Features, Creatures and Flower Power", etc. Locations can be listed and featured and then you can switch to property listings.

The wisdom bite app is attached to a location and will randomly show a wisdom bite at the bottom of the page, relative to the location.

In the front-end, the system allows detailed filtering by property type and destination. There is also an advanced search page where the search form auto-collapses.

Other features are QuickFind, which does an AJAX live search of properties, locations and property types, and also a moderated review for each property, where guests can review each property.

This project took about 5 months to complete.

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