As a business owner you’re constantly challenged with understanding and navigating the technicalities of building a website. More than ever, partnering with the right agency and the right web development software is crucial.
Recently, Airtrain partnered with digital agency MyWork and WP Engine to rebuild and refresh their website and wanted to share the experience for business owners looking to make similar changes.
Brisbane’s Airtrain is the fastest and most cost-efficient way to travel between the Brisbane Airport and the city’s Central Business District, the Sunshine Coast, and the Gold Coast. Airtrain’s web presence followed soon after the railway opened, and it served, much as it still does today, as an informational hub and ticketing platform. After managing the site with a proprietary for nearly two decades, Airtrain’s staff decided to rebuild the site, and they enlisted digital agency MyWork for that very task.
“Airtrain came to us and said they wanted to move over to WordPress,” MyWork Founder and CEO Matt Holme said. “Their staff had a basic skillset when it came to website management, and they had heard good things about WordPress,” he said. “They knew it was a good option for their content creators, who they wanted to arm with the ability to update content themselves, without having to engage a developer.” Holme and his team got to work on the project immediately. In addition to migrating the site to WordPress, it needed a refresh, both for look and feel and overall user experience (UX).
In addition to redesigning the site visually, and creating a more modern, easier to navigate UX, the MyWork team also needed to ensure that the website had stellar uptime and was easily accessible from anywhere in the world. Further, they needed to integrate the new site, using an API, with Airtrain’s ticketing platform. WP Engine, Holme said, was the go-to solution for everyone involved. “WP Engine was an easy recommendation from our perspective, and the team at Airtrain was pleased with the idea,” he said.
The original ticketing system, which Airtrain had built themselves, remained intact, and together, MyWork and WP Engine were able to build the new site so that it worked seamlessly with the old ticketing software. The MyWork and WP Engine teams also needed to integrate Airtrain’s Google Adwords account information into the new site, which Holme said was an easy process through WordPress. “WordPress integrates well with so many martech tools, this was an easy ask,” he said. “We set up the new site so that it would retrieve the metrics they needed and convert them into tangible statistics.” Overall, the project concluded in a matter of months, and the team at Airtrain was immediately pleased with the look and feel of the new site. The new level of performance the site offered, however, went above and beyond their expectations
Airtrain began benefiting from the new site almost immediately. In addition to the new layer of service and support that came from their relationship with WP Engine, the overall performance of the new Airtrain site started paying dividends. From the time the site was launched in Q4 2018 Airtrain saw a 15% increase in pageviews, 2.2% increase in new users, 20.71% increase in page sessions, 2.44% increase in conversion rate and 32.98% in bounce back rate.
