My Creative Tours

About Client:

MyCreativeTours is a company that connects travelers and freelance guides all over the world through its website which is powered by an advance database and search engine system. It is a platform that allows guides to subscribe to the service and gives travelers the opportunity to find tailored, unique tours either on or off-the-beaten track. MyCreativeTours (MCT) fosters an exciting cultural exchange by bringing people who are passionate about their city and country together with travelers who are thirsty for an authentic, inside cultural experience.

Situation:

In its early stages, MCT encountered a common challenge on the IT/software front - finding a reliable, qualified software development provider that can develop within a start-up budget.

Because the success of MCT depended almost completely on the success of its website, it was of paramount importance to boost marketing and sales efforts by establishing the most important marketing tool – MCT´s website. It was crucial that the website be effective, user-friendly, and aesthetically superior to those of other travelling agencies and websites in the market. However, the website would need to be developed within the constraints of a limited budget.

 Although it was Truelogic´s competitive and affordable rates that first turned heads at MCT, it was Truelogic´s efficient and well-organized processes that differentiated them from other providers.

 According to Gianmarco, "I found Truelogic´s ability to estimate the time and resources required for a task to be not only accurate but extremely refreshing! After working with multiple freelancers, I learned that it is a quality that is hard to come by."


It was also important that for MCT to find a provider that could offer technical expertise in terms of analysis and suggeested solutions. Gianmarco estimate that 20% of the work done on his site was a result of technical feedback while the rest of the site was tailored to his own requirement. Even with their own technical background, it was important for MCT to work with a provider that not only followed through with requirements, but was also able to propose the best solutions.

Solution:

After locating and defining problems that MCT´s previous providers had overlooked, Truelogic  carried out major reforms and improvements  in the site´s infrastructure.

Truelogic corrected the problems of MCT´s emailing system so that crucial marketing mails were not being rejected by hotmail and yahoo accounts. The existing infrastructure had also been problematic because the different versions of code introduced by various developers had generated conflicts within the infrastructure.   The appropriate  infrastructure was developed so that multiple developers could work in different coding versions without creating conflicts. Truelogic also enabled security in the website, protecting it from threats and possible problems for the online forms.

 Beyond improvements and re-organization in infrastructure application design, Truelogic developed a site with the following customized functionalities:

• A user-friendly subscription system for guides and tourists joining the MCT network.
• E-commerce functionalities for reservation and payment systems.
• Backend development to administer site users
• Forms for customized tour requests generated by travelers
• Interactive Questions and Answers exchange between guides and travelers
• Spread- the- Word functionality, which allows guides to send messages to their network contacts at MSN, Yahoo and Gmail.
• Multi-language capabilities added for friendly URLs
• Performance improvements to speed up search processes.
  

Technologies:

• JAVASCRIPT/AJAX
• PHP
• MySQL