Case Study: Website Development for travels.life

Project Goal

To create a modern, user-friendly, and scalable web portal for publishing travel articles and recommendations, with the ability to integrate external booking services and manage user-generated content.

Challenges

• Fragmented Content
  There was no unified source of high-quality articles and reviews on destinations, routes, and hotels.

• Need for Integration
  The website needed to connect with external booking systems for flights, hotels, and tours.

• Flexible Content Management
  Editors required an intuitive CMS for quick creation, structuring, and migration of materials to the site.

• High Traffic Load
  A large number of future visitors was expected, so the infrastructure had to be fault-tolerant and easily scalable.

Implementation Stages

Planning (Agile Methodology)

• Requirement gathering: target audience, core features (blog, tour search, user reviews).
• Technical specification creation: functional model, component description, user action scenarios.
  
• System architecture: selected PHP + WordPress; evaluated Headless vs. traditional rendering.
  
• Partner interaction plan: API calls to booking services, database schema sketch.
  
• Sprint planning and roadmap in Redmine: task distribution, prioritization, and deadlines.

Test Infrastructure Setup

• Deployed a separate staging environment on a dedicated server or VM.
  
• Installed and configured components: Nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL/MariaDB, SSL.
  
• Set up Docker-based WordPress container for convenient plugin/theme testing.
  
• Integrated Git version control and CI/CD pipeline (Jenkins/GitLab CI) with PHPUnit tests and staging deployment.
  
• Implemented monitoring (Zabbix/Prometheus) for error and metric tracking during development.

Prototyping

• Created wireframes for key pages: homepage, Uncategorized section, sales page, travel hacks.
  
• UX scenario development: registration/login, review submission, newsletter subscription.
  
• Client approval: menu structure, navigation, layout of homepage and internal pages.
  
• Presented a clickable prototype in Figma to detect early inconsistencies.

Design

• Developed visual style: selected color palette, fonts, icons.
  
• Designed page templates in Figma:
  
  • Homepage with recommendation banner and article grid.
    
  • Article card template (image, summary, author, date).
    
  • Destination page (gallery, description, map, reviews).

• Mobile adaptation (responsive design).
  
• Collected feedback and revised designs through several iterations.

Frontend Development (PHP + WordPress)

• Converted designs into responsive HTML5/CSS3 (mobile-first approach).
  
• Used BEM methodology and SASS for maintainable styling.
  
• Integrated layouts into a WordPress child theme: PHP templates, enqueued styles/scripts via functions.php.
  
• Developed interactive elements: sliders, dropdowns, lazy-loading images.
  
• Cross-browser testing (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) and basic accessibility checks.

CMS and Feature Integration

• Installed and configured WordPress: plugins for SEO (Yoast), caching (WP Rocket), and security (Wordfence).
  
• Developed PHP features for dynamic blocks (tour search, latest articles, trending destinations).
  
• Managed project via Redmine: task tracking, documentation.

External System Integration

• Booking API setup:
  • Configured authorization (keys, tokens) and handled JSON/XML responses.
    
  • Displayed real-time tour prices via custom PHP functions, cached using WP Transients API.

Content Migration and Setup

• Collected articles, images, videos from the editorial team.
  
• Migrated existing content (if any):
  
  • Import/export via CSV/XML, format conversion.

• Manually reviewed content display in new templates.
  
• Created editor guidelines: image format (JPEG/PNG optimized for web), proper tagging and categorization.
  
• Filled initial 50–100 pages with SEO-optimized titles, descriptions, and keywords.

Production Infrastructure

• Production environment setup:
  • Deployed VPS or cloud server.
    
  • Configured Nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL, Redis (for object caching).
    
  • Installed WordPress: code deployment from Git repo, configured wp-config.php, enabled SSL (Let’s Encrypt).

• CI/CD pipeline:
  • On push to master: run tests, build assets (Webpack, SASS), deploy to production.

• Backup and Monitoring:
  • Daily backups of DB and files to remote storage.
    
  • Set up WAF (ModSecurity), restricted /wp-admin by IP.
    
  • Monitoring with Zabbix/Prometheus: uptime, CPU/RAM usage, PHP errors.

Production Launch

• Final code migration from staging to production via CI/CD (GitLab CI).
  
• Tested key user scenarios:
  • Registration/login, newsletter subscription, tour search and booking.
    
  • Checked contact and subscription forms.
    
  • Configured redirects (if URLs changed), finalized SSL setup.

• Performance monitoring: response time, CPU/RAM load, stress testing (e.g., Apache JMeter).

Maintenance and Support

• Tech Support:
  • Uptime and error log monitoring (UptimeRobot, Sentry), regular DevOps checklists.
    
  • Incident response: bug fixes, WordPress core/plugin updates.

• Content Management:
  • Assisted editors with new articles, updated existing content.

• SEO Optimization:
  • Page audits, meta tag fixes, PageSpeed performance improvements.
    
  • Gradual expansion of site sections.

Final Result

Thanks to Agile methodology, Redmine-based task management, PHP + WordPress stack, and a fully configured CI/CD process, the travels.life website was successfully launched on time. The project delivers fault-tolerant and secure performance, provides a user-friendly interface for both editors and readers, and allows flexible integration with external booking services.