Lights Over Lapland: A Case Study.

“Better to see something once than hear about it a thousand times”

Lights Over Lapland have earned a reputation for providing some of the world’s leading Northern Lights experiences, including Nightly Aurora Photo Tours, all inclusive Autumn Aurora Adventures and Customisable Aurora Holidays. They specialise in helping  people from all over the world make the most of their trips to see and photograph the Northern Lights in Abisko National Park, Sweden.

The Brief:

Our client asked us to create a website which plays on the visual nature of the Northern Lights while maximising user experience and minimising bounce rates. Lights Over Lapland use Rezdy booking software, so the new site needed to be built around this, with the aim of improving conversion rates.

Our main brief was to:

• Create a fully responsive website
• Enable cross-browser compatibility of all major browsers
• Enable a modular approach so that each component of a page can be managed accordingly, where content, images and videos are concerned
• Include live aurora forecast images scraped from Space Weather Prediction Center website
• Enable integration with Campaign Monitor for newsletter purposes
• Enable integration of Stripe payment gateway
• Allow integration of Facebook Graph API for photo and blog feed
• Enable integration with Rezdy API, to facilitate online bookings for products and holiday packages, based on real-time availability

To achieve this, WordPress was chosen as the CMS. This allowed our developers the freedom to build on top of the Rezdy booking software. The bespoke site has a highly visual style, showcasing the drama of the Northern Lights and giving site visitors a small taste of what can be expected from their upcoming trip. The site has a clean look and intuitive navigation, so visitors can find exactly what they’re looking for.

The second part of the brief was to develop bespoke software to create a real-time gallery of live images pulled from cameras in Abisko.

This software needed to be:

• Responsive
• Designed from scratch
• Embeddable as an asynchronous web widget
• Lightweight (60 KB) that is loaded in the background
• Available in real-time
• Able to support multiple cameras
• Protected against embedding web viewer on unauthorised websites
• Compatible with Cloud Storage for photo backup purposes (50 GB per month, per camera)

Our developers and designers relish a challenge and love solving them creatively – the solution to this part of the brief was to create completely bespoke software that fetches images from cameras on location in Abisko to create a feed that can be embedded across multiple websites.

The Finished Result:

The completed site has all the bespoke functionality that the client required, wrapped up in a simple yet sleek, modern design. Visitors to the site can explore the Northern Lights adventures on offer and can make their booking when they are ready, whether they are booking a single excursion or are planning a complete holiday package. The effect has been to make Northern Lights tours more accessible and easy to book directly through the site. Don’t just take our word for it though, see for yourself: visit website.

If you’re interested in improving your online presence with a completely new website, or just need to expand your current site’s functionality then get in touch with us by email at [email protected], or call us on +44 (0) 161 818 6861.