Wild Wings Safaris is a tour operator based in George in the Western Cape and one of the highest rated on TripAdvisor. The tour operator offers tours to the Kruger National Park as well as trips and safaris around South Africa and into sub-Saharan Africa, all with a high level of customisation and attention to detail.
Banner image: Wim van den Heever
Wild Wings approached Flow to maintain its existing ExpressionEngine-based website and to later upgrade it to Craft CMS. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a key driver for Wild Wings’ business and it was important to maintain its SEO ranking during the transition. We did this by using Craft CMS custom routing rules, which meant no URL paths needed to be changed, which can often cause a dip in ranking.
We also wrote an extensive migration script that transferred all the data seamlessly into the new website, without requiring the client to copy and paste manually.
The new site takes advantage of the beautiful imagery and content that Wild Wings has from years in the tour operator business. There are more than 500 pages of high-quality text and images, which means Wild Wings often ranks high in Google for searches such as “when to visit Victoria Falls”.
As Wild Wings services mostly in-bound foreign tourists, the server is hosted in the US. Visitors to the website are geolocated based on their internet protocol (IP) address and their currency is customised to either US dollars, British pounds, Euros or rands, with the ability to change their preferences.
The site leverages the best aspects of Craft CMS 3 – namely a robust publishing tool that makes it easy for administrators to make updates, a lightning-quick search query engine and advanced image tools.
To improve page load speed for users around the world, we took advantage of the Cloudflare content delivery network. Even though the website is hosted in the US, images and video are loaded from a server close to the user, wherever they are in the world.
Onne Vegter, managing director of Wild Wings Safaris, says he is pleased with the outcome of the project and that feedback has been positive and site traffic looking good.
“Your team’s excellent suggestions, technical ability, attention to detail and clear communication all made the process much easier than anticipated.
“I also like the fact that Flow offers expertise not just on the development and design side, but also with regard to content creation, editing, social media and online advertising and marketing campaigns. You have a great team at Flow that you can be proud of!”