How do you move three million pages of content without a hitch? Ask Flow Communications.
After months of work the new South African Tourism website, the main destination marketing site for South Africa, was launched on Sunday.
The project took several months and is the biggest migration project done by the company. Flow won the contract to be South African Tourism’s web development company through a public tender.
Flow has done over 100 websites in Expression Engine, including the nelsonmandela.org site. The SAT website’s main migration took about eight weeks to complete.
This is what some of the role-players had to say about the migration project:
Flow CEO Tara Turkington
“The site looks similar to the old site, but has been completely overhauled. Like a car, the painting’s the same but the engine has been completely overhauled, and we built the engine.
“For the user this doesn’t mean much now, except that it will make your interaction with the site so much quicker and smoother. Within the next six months we are doing a redesign of the site. For users around the world, the impression of South Africa will be further enhanced.
“The client has been amazing. They have been engaged and spent a lot of time with us. Kate Els, Bontle Madiba, Ems Tsotetsi, Adele du Toit, William Price and many others – without them, it would have been so much more difficult. They have been knowledgeable, proactive and have supported us rather than pressured us.”
Flow programming studio manager Richard Frank
“A major challenge was the migration of over 3-million data objects from the previous website into the new site. On smaller sites you may get away with copying and pasting the data across to a new site, but on this sort of scale we had to write migration scripts to move the data across seamlessly. We also had to write redirect rules, to ensure that users who visit old legacy URLs will be redirected to the new site.
“The site is hosted on the Rackspace Cloud – the key piece of the puzzle is a caching server that can handle over 200 requests a second. The site has hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, making it one of the most trafficked sites in South Africa. We’re proud of scaleability and flexibility we can offer on a cloud-based solution.”
Flow strategist Kevin Collins
“The southafrica.net migration project has been a very exciting and amazing, action-packed journey. The Flow team of developers has been incredible at smiling and nodding in meetings, and then sorting out the details.
“The SAT clients have been careful, understanding and patient with each step. The completion of the project is a real achievement to all involved, and brings a bring new and very reliable future for South African Tourism’s digital future.”
Flow web developer Klaus Alusa
“Working on a project of this magnitude has been a great opportunity for me, that I truly appreciate. Although my work was mainly front-end development, it has been interesting to see how data gets interpreted and filtered through different CMS systems and the way it gets served based on the target audiences.
“I look forward to maintaining and doing further development on the website. Thanks for the opportunity to be a part of it.”
Flow web developer Reatile Tsikalange
“It was an interesting journey down the data migration road, filled with exciting challenges, hidden gems, dark roast coffee beans that kept us going until the site was launched.
“Everyone in the studio played their part (directly or indirectly). It’s rare that a project requires all the developers to be involved, and this was a great opportunity to do just that. We are now set for new adventures, and ‘leaving the ordinary behind’.”
South African Tourism eMarketing global manager William Price
“Flow, you guys rock! Well done to you and the rest of the team, Tara.
“Southafrica.net and its sub-sites (Media, Research, Trade and Meetings) will be fully functional on the new platform, and while we get final approvals for the new country sites (like Australia), we will keep the NATIVE platform up to ensure that we have a smooth transition without any disruption of services. The TGCSA website, and the FUNDI platform, will also be moved over to the Flow platform during November.
“Thanks for all the hard work from the entire eMarketing Team, and thanks also to the organisation for your support and assistance during this transition. A big thank-you to Flow too, who have delivered beyond our expectations and have made a massive migration seem effortless despite a number of challenges and crazy timelines.”
Click here to check out the new southafrica.net website.