Zürich Tourism is in charge of the destination marketing of the Zurich region and employs professionals in the areas of Markets, Convention Bureau, Marketing, Tourist Information and Finances as well as freelance tour guides.

They’re Zürich's official tourism organisation, and provide tourists with easy to access information about services, hotel reservations, city tours, sightseeing, restaurants and so much more that the city has to offer.

Zürich Tourism
Why Drupal was chosen: 

Drupal was chosen for the Zürich Tourism project because its modularity allows for a great level of flexibility for the editors - they can easily create and publish content, set certain user roles and specific permissions, choose who can access (view, edit or share) specific content and much more.

In terms of features, operation, layout, and design, Drupal is highly customizable, which provides a great variety of choice to both developers and designers to address their clients’ requirements and specific needs.

Drupal also allows for a non-hierarchical and flexible content structure. With a multi-site or multi-domain solution, it’s possible to not only create and manage but also deploy multiple sites from one Drupal CMS installation with great ease. For Zürich Tourism, these multiple sites include:

Zurich Tourism

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

The client wanted their existing Drupal 7 to be redesigned. The aim was to increase the conversion targets, provide better usability for visitors and to create a strong visual impact. Also, the topic “Discover Zurich” was launched, which would enable the still undecided visitors to experience the city.

Since visitors visit the page with different intentions, we have identified the important functions and have incorporated these in the start page. In addition, the mega menu provides shortcuts to exciting content. The “Discover Zurich” topic relies on videos and striking images. By dividing the topic into themes, each audience is able to find exciting content.

To be sure that we take the audience into consideration with every step of the new design process, concept workshops with customers and the involvement of users in surveys and usability tests were used. The design phase also had multiple iterations to continuously improve the final product. Implementation of the new site was based on the existing Drupal 7 site, and in-depth refactoring was performed in order to ensure the stability of the system.

What are you looking for?

We also have some ongoing/long term goals for this project, and this includes: Promoting content and continuing to improve the structure of different types of pages. In terms of SEO, most traffic comes from Google to detail pages and increased searchability of content through the filter pages in very important.

Looking to the future, the client wants to keep users navigating and being inspired and they succeed in the aforementioned by adding more related content and through their content editing by creating beautiful media (images, videos) and promoting interesting content.

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 7.x
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Layout + Structure, Home, Mega Menu
The layout of zuerich.com is based on the panel suite. The page layout is built using panels everywhere which enables us to export the site layout and it’s domain specific variants to features. Following the same logic, the home page is based on a panel page with different variants for each domain, and the mega menu is composed of mini panels, loading into specific menu items through the use of the menu mini-panel module.

The consistent use of Panel for all of these different areas give our content editors the possibility to change the front page and the menu without problems, and it gives us (agency) the possibility to deploy code and configuration changes, without losing the customizations done by our client.

Zurich Tourism Information Office

Multidomain setup
Domain Access is used on zuerich.com to set up the different subdomains and separate the content into different communication areas. The domain setup is relatively straight forward, as we most need the subdomains and domain-specific nodes.
On the https://www.rapperswil-zuerichsee.ch domain we also change the layout slightly, and through the use of a specific sub-theme per domain, these changes can be extended at the wish of the client.

Theme
The zuerich.com theme is based on an Amazee Labs internal starter theme and entirely custom. For the backend, we use the Adminimal theme.

Multilingual
The zuerich.com website is based on entity translation and set up in 4 languages, German, French, Italian and English. Certain subdomains are available in fewer languages. The complete set of modules used for i18n in Drupal 7 is too long to be listed.

Zurich Tourism Recommodations

Performance
Responsive images and lazy loading are used to reduce the load time of media heavy pages. Advanced aggregation and other tools were used to optimise the Google page speed ranking.

Search
Zuerich.com uses different kinds of searches. The main search is set up using a Solr index and search API. Filter pages and load content is based on specific criteria, for example, https://www.zuerich.com/en/visit/accommodation-hotel-bed-and-breakfast-hostel in this case, all accommodation) and display them in a React powered frontend to increase the speed and reactivity of the search functionality.

Organizations involved: 
Project team: 

Project Manager: Dagmar Muth
Project Manager & Site Building: Claudine Braendle
Design Lead & Frontend: Sascha Eggenberger
Design Lead: Lisa Müller
Frontend & Site Building: Sarah Geissberger
Backend: Vasile Chindris
Backend & React: Sebastian Siemssen
Backend: Tadej Basa
Site Building: Saša Nikolič
Backend & Site Building: Philipp Melab
Site Building & Frontend: Stew West

Sectors: 
Travel and Hospitality