Background
As I mentioned in the notes on the British Ski Center / Sierra Essence site, the Portuguese ski school site was entangled with the two other sites previously and had content in common with these. Given the connections between the Portuguese site, Ski Serra Nevada, and British Ski Center / Sierra Essence, it made sense for the new sites to have a similar design but they needed to be separate. In addition, the Ski Serra Nevada was simplified as they don’t deal with the accommodation, transfers and facilities handled by Sierra Essence.
Project
As with the British Ski Center / Sierra Essence, this was a WordPress site based on the theme of the sister site but using some different colours and some simplified design elements.
Because we had already gone through a comprehensive testing of the sister site, we limited the testing on the Portuguese site to only the changed design elements, although we did carry out some general testing to ensure that everything was working as expected.
We faced the same issues in redirecting pages of the old Portuguese site to the new one as we had with the British Ski Center / Sierra Essence site, namely the sheer volume of pages (more than 1000) that the old Content Management System had built and the complexity of the web addresses it had created. Again we built a spreadsheet of all the old pages and where these should redirect to on the new site. We coded this up for the server so that we minimised the chances of a visitor or search engine getting a ‘page not found’ error.
Outcome
The Portuguese ski school in Sierra Nevada now have a modern, fast responsive website that is more attractive to clients. Again, feedback has been excellent and we have moved into maintenance and support mode now, ensuring everything is running smoothly and making any small changes as necessary.
Summary
Client
Ski Serra Nevada
Our role
Development, testing, migration of existing site and implementation.
