Blog: Launches

About Australia is built on a combination of WordPress and custom-developed code

We’re proud to launch AboutAustralia.com, a comprehensive travel website for South Pacific adventures. This was our first really huge WordPress project–we’ve done plenty of them before, but this one manages hundreds of pages and leverages custom code and integration to drive quite a bit of the content from a legacy database system. It’s also loaded with cool JQuery features like content sliders and dynamic galleries. It’s quite possibly the most comprehensive resource on South Pacific travel available on the web.

The wonderful folks at About Australia came to eBlox with an aging web site based on proprietary code. The site performed well in organic search (primarily from age and depth of content) but wasn’t very user-friendly. eBlox developed a completely new visual brand for the company, including logo and overall look and feel.

Then came the fun part: Dealing with hundreds of custom itineraries, each created from thousands of individual components. As a travel wholesaler, About Australia leverages regional expertise to build trips suited perfectly to nearly every need, from scuba diving to escorted tours. Translating all that into a hierarchical information architecture proved to be the biggest challenge. The browsing experience on the site is designed to take the visitor quickly to the list of trips most appropriate for their interests, and its combined with cross-referenced destinations and interests so visitors can quickly move from place to place.

Of course, as with any information-rich site, search is also a key component, and the search feature of About Australia was fine-tuned to deliver accurate trip results. To improve conversion, eBlox added live chat and more aggressive CTAs to the site, and content like photography was beefed up greatly.

We’re really happy with the result—it’s user-friendly, performs well and provides a great information resource for anyone looking to travel to the South Pacific. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Categories: Launches

Customers can now upload art with an order on storeBlox CS

Need to collect art files from customers during the ordering process? storeBlox CS now offers the option to enable art file uploads when a customer adds a product to their cart. If you’re accepting custom, drop-ship orders in your store and need to collect art files, you can now enable this feature in your store by visiting webBlox and doing the following:

1. Click on Site Administration in the left navigation
2. Click on Store directly underneath
3. Click the Features tab at the top of the window
4. Check the “Allow customers to upload artwork for orders” box

That’s it! This will add the Art Upload button to your shopping cart configuration pages, and you can easily retrieve the art either through the order listing in webBlox or via a link in every order email.

Categories: Launches

SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of building a site so that it ranks well in search results. While this is often not a high priority for company stores – they frequently have limited, focused audiences – we like to deliver the best possbile technology for our customers. Therefore, we’ve implemented a new feature to automatically create keyword-optimized URLs for your storeBlox CS company store.

The standard (old) product URL for storeBlox CS looks like this:

storebloxcs.com/product.jsf?id=7603

New URLS now include keywords generated automatically from the product’s actual name:

storebloxcs.com/pl/Retro-Stainless-Steel-Mug/7603

Don’t worry – all your old URLs will still work. The new URLs work alongside the old ones, but your site will immediately benefit from the new URLs every time a new page is generated by storeBlox CS.

Categories: Launches