WordPress Site with API Integrations

How we developed a travel booking website for the world leader in luxury yacht chartering

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Size 50+ employees
Regions Europe, North America and Asia
Client since 2014

About Dream Yacht Charter

Dream Yacht Charter operates over 800 boats in over 40 locations around the world and is one of the world leaders in yacht chartering today.


Project Background

Online bookings can fail for several reasons: the booking engine is overloaded, the booking engine is unavailable, or it is very slow in returning results. This means that users abandon the booking process and do not come back. Alternatively bookings need to be completed over the phone which is time-consuming and expensive.

Dream Yacht Charter commissioned Moove Agency to create an advanced booking system that significantly improves how data is delivered to users by improving the booking process and significantly reducing the response time for online bookings and real-time searches on vast amounts of information stored in remote data centres.

Content-Image
TARGET AUDIENCE

Adventurous traveller with an interest in sailing

Target-Audience Target-Audience

Yacht owners and the yachting community

Objectives

Simplify and improve the booking and enquiry process.

Objectives

Undertake a complete build of the website to provide a clearer user journey and vastly improve the user experience.

Objectives

Integrate real-time yacht management system, SEDNA, in to the website to enable full price break-down and purchase information in order to increase sales.

Objectives

Fully utilise data automation to dynamically pull and display data.

Objectives

Accommodate complex campaign-focussed landing pages.

Advanced Technical Requirements

SEDNA API: A WORLD FIRST INTEGRATION

SEDNA is an advanced real-time yacht management system and holds all of the yacht information including specs, availability and pricing. SEDNA also handles and holds all of the booking information once a booking has been made.

TECHNICAL SOLUTION

We developed a “Bridge” between the SEDNA API and the website. This “Bridge” talks directly to the API and provides data to the website on request.

This ensures not only faster response times for the end user but also ensures the stability and security of the system.

Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of proxy servers deployed in multiple data centers. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance.

Varnish Caching Server

Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It is typically installed in front of any server that speaks HTTP in order to cache the contents.

Varnish Cache is very fast - it typically speeds up delivery of content with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on configured architecture.

Varnish is used by high-profile, high-traffic websites including Wikipedia, online newspaper sites such as The New York Times, The Guardian, social media and content sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Vimeo, and Tumblr.

Dynamic Pags Server - NGINX

NGINX is a high-performance HTTP server known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

NGINX powers several high-visibility sites, such as Netflix, Hulu, Pinterest, CloudFlare, Airbnb, WordPress.com, GitHub, SoundCloud, Zynga, Eventbrite, Zappos, MaxCDN and many others.

The Bridge System

The Bridge is a micro-service we developed that talks directly to the API and provides data to the website on request.

The Bridge system significantly improved the database response times and also ensured higher stability and security of the system. The data that are pulled from SEDNA API are cached in the cloud database with live calls made only for availability requests - this significantly improved user experience as search results are return within seconds compared to up to 10 minutes of waiting time with the old system.

Sedna API

Sedna is an online booking engine with a REST API interface allowing 3rd party developers to connect and retrieve data from its databases. Sedna's response times were very slow which is why we had to develop the innovative Bridge system in order to cache Sedna's data in another cloud database in order to significantly increase the data retrieval times.

WordPress CMS

We utilised WordPress CMS for static parts of the website so that the client can take advantage of the easy-to-use CMS whilst providing real-time search and booking capabilities to their users.

Cloud Database

A cloud database typically runs on a high-performance high-availability cloud computing platform and are designed with scalability in mind.

We specifically chose cloud database for storing our cached data since cloud databases provide the highest response and retrieval times with allowed us to significantly increase the search results response times and improve user experience whilst being able to scale-up to serve user demand in peak times.

PHP CLI

PHP Command Line Interface (PHP CLI) refers to specific usage of PHP in the system command line to run PHP Scripts that aren't on a web server (such as Apache web server or Microsoft IIS). PHP CLI applies all advantages of PHP to shell scripting allowing to create either service side supporting scripts or system application.

Mobile Graph
Users
Browsers
Static Assets Server
CDN
Caching Server
Varnish
Dynamic Pages Server
The Bridge
Sedna API
servers Wordpress CMS
Cloud Database
PHP CLI
How it works

Results are cached overnight with live calls made only for availability requests.

The newly engineered booking process ensures a seamless user experience.

Search results are returned from the cloud database improving performance by more than 1000%.

Caching and CDN servers ensure that static assets such as images are delivered fast to users all over the globe.

REAL TIME BOOKING

Availability and pricing is displayed in real time in a calendar format to enable users to quickly and easily view options and make a booking.

Booking Calendar
PAYMENT GATEWAYS

Integration of multiple payment gateways for regional sites including Authorize Branding and Sagepay has enabled Dream Yacht Charter to take booking deposits online.

WORDPRESS MULTISITE
  • We utilised WordPress Multisite as a cost-effective solution that will support the growth of the business as it continues to scale its global presence.
  • WordPress Multisite has enabled us to clone the website for multiple language variations (currently English, French, German, Swedish and Dutch) and each local website is connected to a different local payment gateway.
WP Installation
EN FR DE SE NL
CRM Integration
  • All user data captured is passed through to the Zoho CRM system for customer retention.
  • Each form has bespoke Zoho settings ensuring complete customisation.
  • Created with scalability and A/B testing in mind, all forms are editable via the WordPress CMS.
Zoho Logo CRM
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
  • Content delivery network (CDN)
  • Image Optimisation (lossless compression)
  • Minified CSS, HTML and Javascript code
  • Mobile optimisation
  • Page speed optimisation
  • Redirection of broken links
  • Semantically structured html tags
  • Sitemaps generated automatically
  • SSL certificate (HTTPS)
  • Structured data (schema)
  • W3C-compliant code
  • Yoast SEO plugin installed and setup
Early Results Significant uplift in online enquiries

Organic traffic engagement up by

85
Early Results Early Results

Homepage bounce rate lowered by

10

Client Testimonial

“ This was a very complex project that required an agency with not only very strong development skills, but also could grasp the complexity of the API solution that we were building. Moove Agency have been an absolute pleasure to work with on this project! I can't imagine finishing the project on time without them. ”
Testimonial Testimonial
Dan Lockyer MANAGING DIRECTOR, DREAM YACHT CHARTER
Testimonial Moove's Account Manager Russell and Dan at the London Boat Show
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