Presenting Problem
The Arizona River Runners have been operating one of the finest rafting tour companies on the Colorado River for many years. As more and more of their clients sought them out online and booked reservations for their dream trip down the Grand Canyon, their system has needed to become more and more efficient. After trusting content updates and trip reservation changes to developers for years, it was time to move their online operation to a content management system that would allow them to make changes quickly. They asked us to rebuild the entire backend of their website, and deploy it, during their season, without any downtime.
Solution
Working closely with their team we combined their marketing and blog websites into one, built on Wordpress. We created a completely custom theme and plugins that integrated directly with their reservation tool to provide real time reservation availability on the website. We kept most of the design the same, while streamlining the code to allow for greater flexibility moving forward and easier maintenance. To ensure we didn't cause downtime in the transition from the old site to the new site, we reviewed and refined the new site many times together. We rehearsed the transition, planning and documenting each step to deploy smoothly, tracking and redirecting old links to make sure every link would work. On deployment day we monitored closely with their team, then spent weeks after refining and ensuring the new site worked better than ever.
Project highlights
Their work is awesome. It's fun being a part of a team that guides adventure trips of a lifetime. They get to lead people through one of the most beautiful, exciting, and memorable experiences of their lives. We enjoy just being connected to that work. Knowing our efforts to push pixels around a screen faster help people connect to this amazing tour outfitter is thrilling. We were pleased to see the project go smoothly and continue to support their business. We look forward to working alongside their team for years to come.