Hotel, Restaurants & Attractions

  • Scope

    Concept, Development, Information architecture

  • Client

    Visit Burnank

  • Year

    2018

The City of Burbank and the Burbank Hospitality Association with an effort to help small businesses of the Burbank City, introduces the city’s attractions, businesses, and events on the Visit Burbank website. In collaboration with the Strausbeg Group, the project’s goal was to develop a custom content management system (CMS) to allow efficient and straightforward management of all sections and, of course, the appropriate markup for the best coordination and display in search engine results.
Visit site

STYLES

Client

The Burbank Hospitality Association is the official destination marketing organization for the City of Burbank, California. Their mission is to promote Burbank, for tourism and to improve the tourism business environment. The BHA goal is to utilize funds to increase occupancy and promote Burbank as a premier business and leisure destination. The Visit Burbank website is their vehicle to obtain these goals while providing visitors and business travelers a one-stop destination to find everything they need.

Chalenges

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this project was the high number of different content types and their display and relationship across the website. Simultaneously, the Google Maps integration to display, search, and filter the results on the map added to the complexity of the project.

We had to consider this as we were planning the site’s data structure to produce the least amount of repeated code blocks. This approach would minimize future system maintenance costs and increase the performance of the website.

On the content management side, we had to incorporate an easy to use interface for the admins with full control to create, update, and remove listings and various content types with ease.

Also, search engine visibility across the website as the primary source of traffic was essential. We also wanted to make the listings appear as rich content in Google’s search results.

And at the end, to increase the user’s engagement, the client wanted to allow the website visitors to store their favorite listings and be able to create their trip itinerary directly from the website.

outcomes

+30%

Traffic from Google Search

-30%

Bounce Rate

+150%

Pages / Session

2x

Load Time

Solutions

In response to the project requirements, we designed and developed a custom content management system using WordPress CMS. We striped down the default admin area of WordPress to make it accustomed to the day-to-day workflow of website administration at Visit Burbank.

Also, we implemented structured data on listing pages to allow the maximum website visibility. During and after the development phase, we continuously monitored the site’s performance with Google Search Console to make sure the highest compatibility with the latest google inspector bots.

We minimized the use of external plugins in this project to a bare minimum by developing custom plugins.

Technologies

Results

During the next few months after launching the website, we saw a significant increase in the site’s organic traffic and a lower bounce rate compared to the previous website. On top of that, the maintenance of the site has been effortless.

The team at Mark It As Done has been working side by side with the Strausberg Group and the staff at Visit Burbank to ensure the site is up and running 24/7 with the highest performance.

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