Regional Tourism Portal CMS

Problem

A German region wanted a tourism portal that could show its highlights to visitors and that its own staff could update. The site also needed subsites for the different parts of the region. It had to run for years and keep growing.

Approach

• I built the main site and all of its regional subsites.
• I was the main technical contact for the client. Next to the project manager, I talked to them about bugs, new features and what to build next.
• I handled bugs and feature work myself, from the first release to the last years of the project.
• I added the interactive map to the portal. It later became the base for the other tourism sites of the agency.
• I tracked custom events on the site with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, so the client could see how visitors used it.
• I worked from designs in Figma and built the pages in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Architecture and design decisions

• The portal ran on a CMS that the client's staff used to edit the content themselves.
• I built the regional subsites as part of the same project, so the region had one site with several parts and not separate websites.
• I used the Foundation CSS framework for the layout. Near the end, we started to move to Tailwind.

Outcomes

• The portal served thousands of visitors.
• It was my main project for about six years, and it grew into a full set of regional subsites.
• The client kept working with me for years, and I was their main contact the whole time.
• The map I built for this portal became part of the other tourism sites of the agency.

Known gaps

• I have no exact visitor numbers. The figure of thousands of visitors is a rough one.
• I do not describe the content model, the editing workflow or how the data was organised.
• The page does not cover performance, search engine results or uptime.
• I do not know how the portal looks or runs today, since I left in 2023.