Challenge

Accommodating complex, varied user journeys seamlessly.

Lovat operates a number of different parks across many locations, each one having their own types of accommodation, pricing and types of holiday.

The considerations for a successful website are many. Facilitating transactions, managing bookings, ease of content management, ensuring a pleasurable, intuitive user search journey….

Further complicating matters is that Lovat caters to two distinct types of customer: those wanting to book a holiday, and those interested in buying a holiday home.

Vision

A dynamic, custom web experience.

There was nothing ‘off the shelf’ that would come close to providing the level of performance required for a website like this. The nature of the requirements necessitated a bespoke solution, integrated with the client’s existing systems.

Craft

A clear technical strategy.

We developed a bespoke integration with the client’s Elite Parks Application Programming Interface (API). This would be used for a number of things:

Retrieving and refreshing essential setup data (such as what parks can be searched against for certain types of holiday, and what dates are searchable for certain parks).
Creating, retrieving, updating and adding special notes to bookings.
Tagging a booking, so it cannot be ‘stolen’ and is locked until a user’s payment fails or a time limit is reached.
Creating an ownership or holiday lead customer after they submit a contact form.
Making a request after a successful transaction on the payment gateway has occurred.
Validating an existing booking’s credentials, so a user could pay their remaining balance for a booking (having only paid a deposit initially).
Retrieving a ‘sensible weather’ quote (this is a ‘weather guarantee’ extra that users can add to their booking; it offers a reimbursement for bad weather).

Other custom elements of this build included GraphQL requests to retrieve ownership and holidays results on a special index page with filters.

The build also features asynchronous search results. That is, the search engine continues to work in the background, fetching and updating results as the user refines their query without the need for a new search.

The website utilises CloudFare’s full page caching with a Craft CMS Blitz plugin, with a range of page speed optimisations.

The website also makes use of dynamic imports, image transforms and critical CSS. These three elements all allow for optimised page load times and resource usage.

Another technical aspect to this build is critical CSS — the visible portion of a web page is rendered as quickly as possible.

A seamless user journey facilitated by bespoke integrations, optimised for page speed.

Deliver

Destination: excellent user experience.

Our client’s new website is dynamic, high performance and scalable — technically excellent and a dream for users and content managers. It facilitates a range of marketing activity, helping Lovat to drive ever-increasing brand awareness and sales.

Wish you were here? Get in touch with us today.