By john05 on

Drupal-powered Travel site with taxonomy-driven color!

We just redesigned and rebuilt content-rich http://www.indianchieftravel.com in Drupal 6 from the ground up. The original theme is A3 Atlantis, with considerable customization. We ask you to test drive it, sample a few pages to see how the tiered color themeing works, and give us your candid feedback. Merci beaucoup!

A brief synopsis:

There were many challenges that necessitated customizations, resulting in several firsts, among them the following:

Taxonomy-driven color coding with a different color for every country and all its destinations, picked on the fly when creating term, and called up by query.

SEO for Views (new module built): Meta tags with page titles, descriptions, keywords, DC title, etc, for views. Page titles and meta tags for Views has always been an issue in the past for Drupal sites. Now we have a module.

Third-party APIs, particularly Google maps at 4 levels: country, state, destination, local address.

Taxonomy-driven hierarchy using terms and books.

Migration of books from D5 to D6 posed some challenges and resulted in the configuration of a module for that too.

We would love to get the community's feedback, advice, and whatever else you can throw at us. In particular, performance remains a source of consternation, and we'd welcome any and all 2-cents-worths on that subject.

Thanks again!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

sovarn’s picture

sovarn commented

Very nice website. I assume that the locations are heirarchial taxonomy terms and that each county/city page just prints a node into the node.tpl.php? And the restaurants/attractions are a specific content type tagged with the city taxonomy and displayed in a view on the appropriate page?

Also in the Amenities and Resources box, how do you display the number of hotels/restaruants etc. in that city?

One suggestion I would make is to improve the navigation. At least have the continents as a primary menu link at the top. It just makes it a little more difficult having to open a menu just to navigate the site. Also makes the site a little confusing as it is not as obvious where to go from the front page. The less a user has to click the better.

Although I do find the large menu very good. Also clicking the country name makes the menu expand to list the cities making it impossible to visit the country page directly. Making the [+] expand the cities and the country name go to the country page could make it easier to navigate. As the country name is just a text, it also makes it poorer for SEO as there is no link for search engines to follow to index the country page. Clicking the continent name also toggles the first country which i assume is a bug.

I hope you find these suggestions useful.

john05’s picture

john05 commented

Yes, the locations are heirarchial taxonomy terms and the restaurants/attractions are content types tagged with city taxonomy. As for the corresponding numbers in the amenities block, I'll have our developers post here to explain that in more technical terms.

Your navigation suggestions are both useful and well taken: they are now on the short list for implementation. The continent click/toggle is indeed a bug: also on short list now!

Thanks again. And anything else you have, please keep it coming... this is good feedback!

ben finklea’s picture

ben finklea commented

Please share the module with the community! I maintain the SEO Checklist module and I'd be happe to include it.

--Ben

--Ben Finklea, CEO
Volacci

john05’s picture

john05 commented

Hey Ben, good hearing from you! And yes, our developers will be sharing the SEO for views module with the community in short order: just some minor tidying up to do on that before putting it up. Coming very soon!