Web Development and Design › case study To fix the navigational issues on the site, the decision was made to simplify the number of choices for the user. Three basic critical processes were identified that the architecture needed to support: • Selecting a destination. • Building an itinerary. • Obtaining detailed information about the city. They also needed to fix the management of the site. Originally the back-end of the site was managed through a variety of tools which did not integrate well. These were made up of custom publishing solutions and blogging tools. GPMTC has many custom publishing needs and during the course of the project, Happy Cog realised they needed to find one comprehensive content management solution to successfully handle all of the sites requirements. They decided on ExpressionEngine (EE) as a platform for the project since this enabled authors with varying levels of technical skill to get to work immediately. This was a pivotal requirement since GPTMC needed to migrate hundreds of entries from a legacy MS SQL/XHTML publishing platform to a MySQL/Textile system manually. It also meant that Happy Cog’s developers were able to code XHTML with real-life website copy and not worry that real copy would break the layout after coding was complete. At the same time, the Happy Cog team was able to: • Distribute their development workload due to a well documented templating language. • Work on the front-end and back-end concurrently to code pages. • Hook up basic site functionality while working on front-end XHTML development. • Free their back-end developers to focus on coding custom functionality. • Develop front-end JavaScript slideshows that can be customised and edited. Another major change was the URL. From http://www.gophila.com it was changed to http://www.visitphilly.com/. This meant implications for the search engine visibility of the site. To combat this, the team worked together with SEO organisation, Seer Interactive, to implement a 301 redirect tool which allows GPTMC to specify routes and make sure the search ranking are not negatively affected. (Adapted from happycog.com, 2010)110