Always judge webdevelopers on their latest work. Internet technology is evolving fast and so is the knowledge of good designers. They are in a constant process of learning. Read about the background of one of our latest built websites here.

The client

Sea Queen Fleet is a well established owner and organizer of liveaboards all over the Egyptian Red Sea with a developed network of agents worldwide. They already had a website that was nice but needed to be updated. The client commissioned the new site initially to another developer but wasn't happy. The site wasn't much of an improvement compared with the old site. We knew in advance the change had to be more radical.  Being scuba divers ourself we also wanted easy accessible info about the Red Sea dive sites in the new site.

What is special in the site

The site is SEO-ed, has some integration with Facebook and a printer-friendly version of most pages. It is truly multi-language, uses real time web analytics and offers easy accessible webmaster tools. Below we give a bit of insight on what Drupal modules are used.
Click on the section titles to open the relative pages in a new window to see what we are talking about.

Frontpage

To see what the site offers without  having to scroll down, we used of a slideshow that functions also as menu.

If an image contains text, like in our slideshow, visitors expect to go to related pages when you click on them. The "problem" was it's only feasible to load one image per slideshow menu item. An image mapper is used to link areas of this image to different pages. To emphasize they are clickable, they are highlighted on mouse-over.

Modules: Views Showcase
Other utilities: Handy Image Mapper

About our fleet - The boats

Each boat has a dedicated page to present it. Most people want to check out the boats before they book. It has to contain specifications, images and a video. The perfect job for a Panel display in nice clean rounded boxes. The photo gallery had to be tweaked to make the active image thumbnail appear with a red border. It loads relatively quick. The videos opens in a dark overlay browser (Lightbox) without leaving the page. This makes that if you close the window halfway the video, it will not continue to download it, as opposed to an embedded version that annoyingly continues to download even if you stop it ( at least with YouTube vids).

The webmaster has a series of  links at the bottom of the page to easily add own or third party images (e.g. Flickr) and videos (e.g. YouTube)  just by copy-pasting the URL's.

Modules: Embedded Media Field, Views Galleriffic, Node Reference URL Widget, Panels

Itineraries - Dive sites

In the taxonomy tree structure dive sites make part of a route (itinerary) and itineraries start at a departure port, as is reflected by the dropdown menu. Each of those levels shows a map with the containing dive sites. On the level of dive site links are shown to the two nearest other dive sites, together with the distance translated to navigation time based on an average speed of 7 knots. This is calculated dynamically, based on the geo info (lattitude and longitude) of the dive sites.

Other modules: GMap, Views Custom Field

Our agents

An accordion style list that opens only the agent details of the country the visitor clicks on. Note that the printer-friendly version only displays the expanded data.

Modules: Views Accordion, Print

Availability

The display and functionality of this part lives outside the Drupal system (apart that is's a page content type with a PHP input filter) and is built by a programmer in PHP using XML data imported from a synchronized local Excel file. Agents can log in and see a user customized version.

Encountered problems

Having several javascripts running at the same time makes the pages a bit slow. We are saved by the cache and the fact that many of the images come from third party providers. The internet connection here in Egypt is not the fastest ( in most cases a mobile connection is faster than the offered landlines). If it runs here, we can be quit sure it runs in Europe.

Future plans

Visitor interaction is absent right know. If we want to create a group of returning users we should open the at least the dive site pages for comments. For the boats we are considering a trip logbook in which the guests can share their photos with the others from the group. Of course with the possibility to pull in complete albums from Flickr or Picasa.

More like this

• http://www.promo.sharmweb.net/showcase-diving-bikers