"In the three months Mugo worked on our new version -- which had stalled with our previous developers -- we have made more progress than ever before. They are fast, precise and thorough, and definitely stand out in the industry!"
Frogs-in-NZ is a New Zealand travel agent catering to French-speaking visitors and expatriates from around the world. Their website provides extremely comprehensive help and material about visiting or moving to New Zealand, and has a lively and engaged community with tens of thousands of forum messages. Mugo helped to push the re-launch of the Frogs-in-NZ website earlier than expected while implementing many eZ Publish best practices.
"From our first contact, the team at Mugo has shown an unprecedented level of commitment to our web projects... ending almost 4 years of struggling! In the three months Mugo worked on our new version -- which had stalled with our previous developers -- we have made more progress than ever before. They are fast, precise and thorough, and definitely stand out in the industry!"
- Sébastien Michel, Director, Frogs-in-NZ Limited
The Frogs-in-NZ website is entirely in French and offers a wealth of free information as well as paid services. The website is of upmost importance to the Frogs-in-NZ business; since they do not have the size of operation to have a direct presence in other countries, they rely on the website as the first entry point for most people to discover what Frogs-in-NZ can offer.
Among the free information that can be found on the site is the following:
As a travel agent, Frogs-in-NZ is able to sell the following through their website:
The Frogs-in-NZ website has a very active forum, with about 15,000 users and 85,000 forum messages contained in about 15,000 topics going all the way back to April 2003. Visitors discuss topics from visas and taxes to recommended neighbourhoods and mobile phone companies.
Broken out from the forum is the "petites announces" section, otherwise known as the classifieds. Here, people can post classified ads to sell their car, to post a job opportunity, or to sell furniture and appliances with a small listing fee. They can post classified ads of other types for free. The behind-the-scenes workflow for the creation of a classified ad determines whether a payment is necessary, accepts the payment and stores information about the requested category, and links the purchased credit to the correct ad.
The revamped website features eZ Flow to create dynamic home pages and sidebars and eZ Find to search content from across the site. Mugo Web helped to set up the publishing process to make it easy for editors to feature different services and stories in content blocks. We helped optimize the content structure so that complex page elements are loaded and searched in a responsive manner. Using eZ Publish template best practices, we optimized smart caching rules, dynamic menu generation, forum user statistic generation, page styling, and more.
On the server end, Mugo Web troubleshooted some issues that were causing regular and significant slowdowns and crashes on the site. We analyzed the types of page requests and properly configured a few important MySQL database settings, which completely eliminated the site issues and dramatically improved site speed.
When things go seriously wrong in a well-built but complicated system, the cause is often a cascade of small failures that pile up. Not that we’re building rockets over here, but an excellent example is the ill-fated Ariane flight V88. Solving the issues behind such failures can be problematic. Many things contribute to the difficulty, from the extensive use of caching to the need to convincingly reconstruct the failure in retrospect. Debugging this kind of failure, especially under pressure, is hard. We consider the ability to do this to be the hallmark of a senior developer. Even so, it is essential to have a team of experts working together to troubleshoot issues and find solutions promptly to help keep your site running.
Haliburton County Public Library connects with its patrons through a new, accessible site and brand relaunch
If you manage one of the millions of websites affected by the Google-mandated migration from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you might be following the best practice of simultaneously running UA and GA4 scripts until you’re ready to adopt GA4 fully. One of the analytics features that needs special attention is cross-domain tracking.
A great deal is only “great” if it ends up paying off in the long run.
This truth is perhaps best expressed by author Terry Pratchett in his “Boots theory” of economic value, as laid out in his iconic Discworld novel series:
The Toxics Use Research Institute (TURI) at the University of Massachusetts Lowell wanted to add memos to records in its Pollution Prevention Options Analysis System (P2OASys), a database for evaluating and comparing the safety of chemistries. TURI could have elected to simply add a field to its database structure, but it saw a bigger opportunity to reinvent a key system that had not been updated for more than five years.
Business data is inevitably distributed across multiple systems. However, we know that customers are not prepared to deal with that kind of complexity, especially when they see little relevance or value to the task at hand. A typical location for this kind of friction is in the integration of the Content Management System (CMS) and the Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). Integrating the two can help provide a seamless experience for the customer and increase the overall usability of your website.
Websites are not static things; they are a dynamic part of your company and the actual storefront for all of your online customers. Most companies acknowledge the importance of upkeep on their brick and mortar branches, websites often aren’t given the same consideration. Your website should constantly evolve to keep up with current standards, trends, and the functionality your clients deserve. We often don’t realize what opportunities we are missing and what we are leaving on the table by relegating website maintenance to the bottom of the list.
Promoting events and managing attendee registrations is one of the key ways a modern website supports a public library's educational mission. Here at Mugo Web, we’ve developed a comprehensive Custom Event Registration System that lets library staff schedule recurring event series, create waiting lists for popular programs, and even manage sign-ups for multiple children from one family.
Mugo Web
Unit 205, 332 Columbia Street
New Westminster, BC
V3L 1A6, Canada
Phone: 604-637-6396
E-mail: hi@mugo.ca
