James Osborne helps unleash new Dungeons website
[June 2007]
The web team at Holiday Extras is building an excellent reputation for creating easy to use websites that significantly increase visitor numbers for a range of external clients.
Following the success of the website it produced for LEGOLAND, which has helped boost online bookings by around 300%, Holiday Extras was asked by The Dungeons to create a new website to speed up the booking process.
Building on the knowledge and expertise gained from producing user-friendly booking systems for Holiday Extras' own website as well as other clients, the web team replaced the clunky five-stage booking process with a much faster two-stage system. The Dungeons was so pleased with the subsequent spike in bookings that it then expanded Holiday Extras' brief and asked the web team to completely re-build its website and to take responsibility for everything from search engine optimisation to content and maintenance.
James Osborne of Holiday Extras was lead template builder on The Dungeons project and he explains: "We've got a very large skill set here and a great team of people and it's reassuring to know that we can do everything in-house".
The web team at Holiday Extras began by simplifying The Dungeons old website by removing most of the Flash content, making the site faster to load particularly for users with a standard 56k modem. This also made the site easier to read by search engines - helping to improve the search engine ranking - and easier to update. The structure of the website was updated too so that it would work on Firefox browsers as well as Internet Explorer.
Another important aspect of Holiday Extras' work on The Dungeons website was to considerably expand the content, adding detailed information on such things as rides, special offers and opening times, and new features such as Google maps. This is also improving search engine visibility by increasing the range of search terms through which users can find the site. Other new features added by the Holiday Extras web team included email sign-up so visitors can keep up to date about new rides and special offers.
As The Dungeons has attractions in Hamburg and Amsterdam as well as London, York and Edinburgh, Holiday Extras was also tasked with producing German and Dutch language versions of the website.
James and the team are now looking forward to attracting more commissions from discerning clients as Holiday Extras expands its product portfolio, particularly in the short breaks market. "I really enjoy new challenges and the discipline of building to customer requirements," comments James.
In the eight years he has been at Holiday Extras, thanks to the company's commitment to training and developing its staff, James has progressed from working in the call centre to becoming technical support engineer. And in only 16 months on the web team he has gone from "knowing nothing about building websites" to become lead template builder. "I wouldn't change it for anything, it's been brilliant," says James. "I've ended up in an area I excel in and really enjoy."
interview by Nick Purdom
