Six-Two by Contiki
This project hinged upon a smooth WordPress migration. Six-Two, a travel and lifestyle magazine from global travel brand Contiki, had an existing website hampered by creaking architecture and deprecated software. This made it impossible for the marketing team to keep up with our ever-changing digital landscape. It’s no fun to feel age catching up with you, especially if you’re a provider of social travel adventures for the 18-35s!
Rebuilding a popular website like Six-Two needs expert hands at the wheel, because migrating almost 3,000 articles is fraught with danger. Nobody wants to risk damaging years of well-earned SEO clout with a poorly-executed migration. Six-Two also needed to avoid disrupting the user accounts of their 1,000+ content contributors.
We built a custom script to migrate article content from a previously convoluted system. This extracts the data and converts it into a series of appropriate bespoke Gutenberg blocks. The result of this process is a frontend that looks faithful to the previous site, with slight refinements, while being radically improved in the backend.
The content of each article now exists as interchangeable components in the modern WP block editor. This completely transforms the editing experience (to read our article about this new paradigm in content management click here). Working with content has been reinvented from a somewhat abstracted and clunky workflow, to a completely flexible and intuitive one.
On top of this, our custom solutions greatly reduce the reliance on 3rd party code. We slashed the list of installed plugins from over 50 to around a dozen. This is a huge security boost, and a lightweight codebase is also more efficient and maintainable.
The Six-Two team now have a versatile foundation upon which to layer feature enhancements. The first post-migration project we will be implementing for them is to introduce a system for regionalised advertising.
