MySwitzerland.com
Switzerland Tourism provides travel information, reservations, and insights on the 350 villages, hundreds of ski slopes, hiking trails, biking routes, restaurants, hotels, and museums throughout the country.
Challenge
To build a multi-language, media-rich site.
Benefits
· ColdFusion-based site is 10 times faster than the previous version of the site.
· Doubled traffic without performance impact.
· ColdFusion Markup Language is easy to learn and use.
Project Details
With its stunning scenery and world-class cuisine, Switzerland remains one of the world's most popular travel destinations. In fact, employing more than 300,000 people and generating $16 billion in revenue, tourism is Switzerland's third-largest industry.
Today, with the advent of the Internet, Switzerland Tourism has been in the vanguard of Web-based tourism information, creating an incredibly content-rich, transaction-capable "Destination Marketing System."
Whether you're interested in relaxing by the shores of Lake Geneva, skiing or snowboarding in the Alps, or sampling the museums of Zurich, MySwitzerland.com, the official portal of Switzerland Tourism, is ready to provide—in six different languages—information, pictures, videos, reservations, and merchandise.
In the mid-90s, MySwitzerland.com—like many Web sites of its kind—was fairly static, providing pure HTML publishing of some of its deep content resources. "We realized that the Internet presented a huge opportunity for us to spread the message that Switzerland is one of the most beautiful destinations in the world," said Juerg Schmid, chief executive office of Switzerland Tourism. "We built our initial site ourselves—and it was pretty useful. But we realized that as technology was advancing and improving, there were new ways to leverage it to make our portal more attractive. We wanted to exploit our rich content and provide a more dynamic experience for our site visitors."
Recognizing that his organization's expertise lay in tourism—and not Web site development—Schmid turned to Level 9, a Macromedia Alliance Partner based in Montpelier, Vermont that specializes in destination marketing systems. Level 9 had previously created Discover-Vermont.com and Discover-Scotland.com—experiences that Schmid found relevant and compelling.
"We were looking for some advanced ways to deliver our content—which is probably the most complete set of data related to a national destination site in the world," Schmid said. "Level 9 understood our objectives and challenges and had demonstrated experience in these areas—they made an ideal partner for us."
ColdFusion—Superior Delivery Platform
After carefully defining and analyzing Switzerland Tourism's new goals for its MySwitzerland.com site, the team boiled down the site's vision to its essence—"Dream, Plan, Go."
"When you talk about travel, you're really talking about emotions," said Schmid. "You're selling dreams—the best days and weeks of a person's life. We wanted our site to really play up that excitement by offering all of the resources to let people explore travel possibilities, make plans, and actually execute transactions for their vacation."
For Level 9, that meant a major Web site development—and choosing a development platform. Initially, Level 9 had created its own development language—a tag-based language, which it called IML—that was used to create early versions of MySwitzerland.com. While satisfactory for simpler sites, IML wouldn't be sufficient for the site Level 9 and Switzerland Tourism were now envisioning. According to Dave Mayette, chief executive officer of Level 9, a new level of robustness was required.
"We wanted a superior delivery platform that would help us better manage our content and increase the speed of the site," he said. "After looking at the alternatives, we concluded that Macromedia ColdFusion was the best choice by far."
ColdFusion is Macromedia's application server for building and deploying scalable Web applications that integrate browser, server, and database. Open integration with databases, e-mail, directories, XML, and enterprise systems enables Web developers to build sophisticated applications quickly and easily. ColdFusion also provides security on every level, from Web development through deployment. MySwitzerland.com's implementation also featured Macromedia Flash, for low-bandwidth animations; and Macromedia FreeHand to streamline visual interface design and illustration.
"We selected ColdFusion for several reasons," Mayette said. "It offered us breakthrough performance in the speed the site would be able to offer. ColdFusion is very scalable, which was a key consideration for us, since we expected to increase the scope of our site and the volume of our traffic. We liked the extensive support that exists for ColdFusion and the healthy developer community. And we also found—as a bonus—that ColdFusion was very similar to our own internally developed IML language, which meant a much shorter learning curve for our team."
Simultaneously, Level 9 moved the MySwitzerland.com site from an open-source PostgreSQL database to Oracle 8i. "The combination of ColdFusion and Oracle is a perfect platform for ensuring the high performance characteristics we were seeking," said Mayette.
Using the new Macromedia-Oracle platform, Level 9's team of three engineers, two database administrators, three interface designers, and a systems administrator assembled a deep and broad site covering virtually every aspect of Swiss travel and tourism, including 450 destinations, 1,800 hotels, and more than 60,000 events in the country ranging from concerts to museum exhibits to ski races.
Visitors select their originating country and see dynamic database-generated content in any of six languages. They can explore different destinations—everything from restaurant menus to real-time weather and ski conditions. Visitors can make car, hotel, or chalet reservations online—and even purchase lift tickets or Swiss merchandise such as watches and specialty foods. A unique travel wizard helps guide site visitors through the process of selecting a destination and making reservations.
Created with Macromedia Flash, the site's menu-based navigation draws on parameters from MySwitzerland's database. When Swiss Tourism makes changes to the various vacation packages or other travel offerings, there's no need to change the interface—the dynamic Macromedia Flash menu simply reflects the new underlying database content in th
Distributed Content Management
According to Mayette and Schmid, remote content management is a crucial feature of the new site. "With so many destinations, we have more than 1,500 remote content providers," said Schmid. "We needed to provide them with a simple, intuitive way to update their own content. For example, a ski-resort would want to update its snow conditions on a daily basis so that site visitors have accurate reports. With our new site, they can do so on-demand, independent of Switzerland Tourism."
"One of the major reasons we went with ColdFusion was to increase the speed of the site," Mayette said. "With ColdFusion, we have seen about a two to three fold improvement in the speed of our site. That's been crucial, considering the richer content types and transactions we're serving up."
What's more, the site is also serving a much larger audience. Today, MySwitzerland.com serves up more than 85,000 page views a day to an average of more than 12,000 unique visitors. "We have increased the number of site visitors by more than 100% in the year since this new site went online," Schmid said. "And our page views are up 130%, which means our site stickiness is going up as well."
Site Summary
Schweiz Tourismus
Toedistrasse 7
8022 Zurich
Switzerland
Macromedia Products:
ColdFusion Enterprise 4.5.1; ColdFusion Studio 4.5.1; Flash 5; FreeHand 9
Hardware:
Three Dell PowerEdge multi-Xeon processor servers with 700 MHz processors, 45 GB RAID storage, and 1 GB RAM
Operating System
Red Hat Linux 6.2 (2.2 kernel) for database; Red Had Linux 7.0 (2.2 kernel) for ColdFusion
Database:
Oracle 8i and Microsoft SQL Server
Size of DB:
1 million records
Internet Connection:
OC-3
Development Team:
9 professionals total: Developers, DBAs, and Designers
Site Traffic:
12,000 unique visitors and 85,000 page views per day
Industry:
Travel and Tourism
Benefits:
-
· Performance—"Our ColdFusion-based site is 10 times faster than the previous version of the site."
· Scalability—"We've doubled our traffic in a few months without and performance impact."
· Ease of Learning—"We are very comfortable with the simplicity and the power of ColdFusion Markup Language."
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