⁠The Finnish Travel Association SMAL – renewal of three websites

The Finnish Travel Association (Suomen matkailualan liitto ry, SMAL) is an alliance of travel industry companies whose task is to promote the development of the travel agency and tourism industry in Finland, to safeguard the interests and rights of its members, and to uphold good business practices.

⁠One shared website platform, three identities of their own

We built SMAL a multisite solution in which all three websites run on top of the same technical website platform. The solution makes it possible to use shared content blocks, components and technical features across the different sites, while each site could be given a completely distinct visual look and atmosphere of its own.

The multisite solution makes maintenance and further development more efficient: new features and technical improvements can be developed centrally, making them available on all the sites. At the same time, the site-specific content and visual look can be kept independent. This gives SMAL a long-lasting and cost-effective foundation for the continuous development of its online services.

⁠Easy-to-find information and smooth transactions

The renewal put user experience and the findability of information at the centre. On SMAL’s main site in particular, the online service plays an important role in presenting the organisation’s activities, membership, and the benefits and services offered to members. In addition to public content, the site serves SMAL’s members through a member portal.

With the new structure and flexible content elements, information is presented more clearly and maintaining the sites is considerably smoother. Content producers can build pages in more versatile ways without even small changes requiring technical implementation.

On the Matkatieto site, the content is focused each year on the programme season, but materials and presentations from previous years are also kept on the site. The Finnish Travel Gala site, in turn, presents, among other things, the gala’s speakers, partners and the event’s most important information, as well as a vote carried out through an external service.

⁠An easily updated and further developed website ecosystem

The previous websites were technically outdated and in many places clumsy to maintain. Editing content was limited, the desired content elements were not available, and even small changes could require code-level implementation.

With the renewal, SMAL gained a modern and flexible content environment in which the sites’ content can be updated and built independently. A versatile set of content elements makes it possible, for example, to combine text and images flexibly and to build different kinds of content sections without technical implementation.

The website ecosystem is also supported by analytics integration and tracking, which make it possible to monitor and develop the use and functioning of the sites on a data-driven basis in the future. In addition, the technical security and SSL protection of all the sites were brought up to date.

As a result, three websites that retain their own identities were built for SMAL, united by the same modern technical foundation. The multisite solution, mobile friendliness, accessibility and ease of maintenance make up an overall website architecture that serves both the sites’ users and SMAL’s own organisation, and provides a strong foundation for the future development of the online services.