CitySupport

Website and booking engine for GaSamen.nl

CitySupport is known as one of the Dutch specialists for city trips with websites like Parijs.nl, Barcelona.nl and Berlijn.nl. To stay on top of their game, CitySupport created a new brand called GaSamen.nl, which meant that their websites got a complete make-over to remain one of the best out there without losing any of the number one rankings they currently held in Google.

With no less than 36 different domain names they offer a unique portal for almost every major city in Europe, running on a single engine for easy content management, statistics and booking overviews. The booking engine allows customers to compare and instantly book the trip of their choice.

With the new design, done by HBMEO, we could work our magic! Although design is not really our cup of thee, we have some talented designers and scripters working for us, to transform static designs in to rich, Javascript enabled features. For example, the slideshow and city selector pull down at the top.

The booking engine, developed in Python, interacts seamlessly with the CMS, developed in PHP. The booking engine communicates with partnering companies to request availability for hotels and flights. The partnering companies also provide up-to-date descriptions for their travel products that can be viewed, edited and enriched by GaSamen.nl staff for their own websites.

With intelligent URL rewriting and SEO techniques, almost all of the old URLs to content and travel products (still present in blogs, search engines, articles, etc.) would lead to the correct URL in the new design. This provides the best experience for users while at the same time allows GaSamen.nl to keep their number one position in Google.

Sanoma Digital

High performance content delivery platform

Sanoma Digital, responsible for almost every magazine in the Netherlands, has a website or mobile application for almost all their magazines and serves thousands of users on a daily basis. The popular news website Nu.nl, women's magazine Viva.nl or Playboy.nl, all have feeds that are read by users with feed readers or by mobile applications.

With such a high number of users, performance and availability play a crucial role. We designed a horizontally scalable solution for Sanoma Digital which we are currently implementing.

Unfortunately, we cannot go into further details on this project as it is still a work in progress but we're very enthousiastic about it!

Eneco

Agile management tool for Stedin.net

The management of Eneco (Stedin.net at the time) decided to optimize their work flow for end customers to drastically decrease the time it takes for a customer request to be processed and executed. To this end, they required internal changes but also tools to make it all possible. The current system was far too complex and inflexible to introduce such a new tool. One of the tools can be described best as an overview or status view of all the different, existing systems, and allow them to communicate with each other. Apart from the overview, it would act as a hub between the customer, Eneco and external contractors.

Although the tool was for internal use, it required to communicate with external web services and communicate back to customers and external contractors. We developed a website for their intranet to accommodate their wishes for such a tool.

In the old situation, where literally one form of one system was printed and typed in by employees to another system, it took almost half a year (!) to complete a single request from processing to execution. We created a website that could read from all the different systems and present employees with the status of every customer request.

To this end, the system behind the website would grab customer requests and processes the "simple" ones (95% of the requests) automatically by finding all the required information in other systems (postal check, Google maps for measuring the distance between points of interest, checking for electric cables, request home measurement installation numbers, etc.) and feed this information to internal systems (accountancy and existing status systems) and external systems (email to contractors or plan in a agenda). More complex requests would still require some manual actions.

The end result was a Python based proof-of-concept system that allowed Eneco to process a "simple" request in only a single week.

Gemeente Den Haag

Website engine for Denhaagontmoetdenhaag.nl

The municipality of The Hague (in Dutch, Gemeente Den Haag) launched a new concept to promote cooperation between schools. The project name, "Ontmoetingen" literally means "to meet" and is intended for schools with a different cultural backgrounds to organize projects together such as festivities for holidays, sport events, a trip to the local zoo, etc. This website can also be used for ideas from other schools and provides a place to show photos and videos to parents. Finally, the local government can be asked to give subsidiaries for certain projects once they are planned by a school.

In cooperation with Fabrique, who made the design, we were contacted to provide the technical expertise for the project.

Django was chosen to power the whole website. The frontend is not too complex, especially when not logged in as a school representative. However, a website, available to the public and as part of any government or government agency needs to meet heavy accessibility requirements.

The website features an administrative area, which becomes available when logged in, where a school representative can create events in an agenda, invite other schools to participate in an event, place documents, videos and images, etc.

The regular frontend shows the school profiles, together with the videos and images that were marked as public and has some demo projects for inspiration. All manageable by either a supervisor of the municipality of The Hague or by a school representative.

ID&T

Restful travel web service to power sensation.com

ID&T is one of the leading companies who organizes huge dance events all over the world. One of their most famous one, Sensation, features world-renowned DJs who show their bests musical accomplishments while dancers, acrobats, state-of-the-art lightshows, lasers and fireworks create an extraordinary stage show.

Since, specifically, Sensation takes place all over the world and also attracts people from all over the world, ID&T wanted to provide a whole experience for visitors rather than just offer admission tickets. To bring the best experience for Sensation to the visitor, well thought out packages are offered consisting of a flight, hotel, transfers from the hotel to the event and back, a hostess, additional gifts, etc. and, of course, an admission ticket to the event area.

Maykin Media developed a system where various travel products can be added together from various sources to create a package. Such travel products include the company's internal admission ticket stock, a flight with any airline or a hotel. Anything that is needed to make Sensation into an experience from start to finish.

On the backend, staff members can create and manage these travel products, while on the frontend, the system is accessible via a restful API. The API is restful, fast, horizontally scalable and the output is very clean and readable which, as you can imagine, make it very easy to integrate for other developers.

The API allowed ID&T to integrate the travel products into their existing shop that offers gadgets, DVDs, MP3, etc. Buying a Deluxe package to Sensation in Sydney, Australia, in combination with T-shirt or DVD of the previous event... No problem.

GetAway Travel

High performance availability searches for Egypte.nl

Maykin Media was consulted for a partial redesign of Egypte.nl which included a dynamic, runtime definable filter system for travel products. The staff of GetAway Travel should be able to add filters to the website if so required. A filter could be on any property of the travel product, such as the number of days, the destination, weather, number of stars of the hotel, etc. Naturally, on the website, the filters should be very, very fast and up to date, or potential customers would lose interest.

The existing website was created in PHP. We had quite some freedom in the programming language and server configuration "as long as it worked". We choose Python with Django to introduce Haystack with Solr as search engine. We love new technologies and this combination of Haystack with Solr enabled us to achieve lightning fast searches through heaps of data.

For GetAway Travel, filters, to quickly search on travel product properties, can be defined in Django's management interface. To complete the task, Javascript was used to make these filters available to visitors so they can easily search on the website for trips that meet their demands. According to the client, this real time method of searching is "unique in the travel industry".

Nile Travel

Website and booking engine for Vliegfabriek.nl

Nile Travel has been a travelling specialist for Egypt for many years. With Vliegfabriek.nl, Nile Travel launched a new name and concept in the travel industry. You won't have to book your ticket, hotel, car rental and excursions on different websites, you can do it all in just a few easy steps at Vliegfabriek.nl.

Vliegfabriek.nl has no inventory of its own but uses several third parties to retrieve stock information for their travel products. Prices might differ from minute to minute with these third parties. Vliegfabriek.nl is able to cope with all these price changes by caching the right information and only retrieve availability and price information when required.

With mocking and staging environments, the whole website and booking process - which is only 2 steps - can be simulated. Including the payment steps. This makes it easy for the developers to test their changes and for Nile Travel to see their wishes implemented.

In addition, an API is available to let commercial banners connect to Vliegfabriel.nl in real time and request availability and price information while the banner is shown on some other website. The API is also used to power some third party websites, that specialize in certain travel products and tune Vliegfabriek.nl to their own specialization.