Digital travel network creating and curating genuine, ‘in the moment’ travel content.
Client
Travelspective
Project
Website
Deliverables
Design, WordPress Plugin Developemnt, CMS Customizing
Background
Travelspective is located in Miami FL, and is known for curating and producing genuine ‘in the moment’ content that showcases the experiences that can be had around the world. Their content aims to inspire you to travel, and then guide you through the journey. Through the video journey, they introduce you to local culture and find some of the very best local food and experiences that are not widely included in classic travel guides. Travelspective truely gives you the viewer the ability to “See” the world and experience culture through the “Window” that is Travelspective.
Mission
Our mission for Travelspective was to develop a website on top of the WordPress blogging platform that doesn’t simply look like a blog. The website primarily serves video content, so the system had to be robust enough to handle the major processing demands of video content. The user experience for the viewer needed to be simple, clear, and mobile friendly.
Process
For Travelspective, we had multiple factors to consider. First, the client wanted to use WordPress, and we agreed, that for a website like this which would be posting regular content, a blog concept made sense. Next, we needed to decide what media delivery system would be best for usability, and system performance. Self hosting the hundreds of videos that would be on the site would create a significant load on the server and possibly causing it to be susceptible to constant crashing. Our research led us multiple paths such as streaming videos from Vimeo, YouTube, JWPlayer, or self-hosted.
Solution
Our solution to the website need was multi-faceted. Our first deliverable was to develop a customized theme for WordPress that utilized custom functionality to support the posting of video content. Second, Our choice for delivery landed on JWPlayer to deliver content. JWPlayer has the best support for mobile functionality and proved to be the best choice for this site. We developed a fully custom plugin that would integrate JWPlayer videos into the post, and stream the content from JWPlayer’s hosting platform. This relieved the potential for overload on the server. To ensure optimum performance, we are using Amazon Cloud Hosting to provide constant uptime reliability and enhanced security to the website.
Result
The partnership between Graywell Design and Travelspective resulted in an online experience for the world that provides a unique view into travel destinations all around the world. The website has been experienced by over 89,000 people within the first year, resulting in over 260,000 video plays!
