Looking for a partner to continually enhance and maintain their most critical digital asset, their Umbraco website hosted on Azure
Kalahari Resort & Conventions consists of four full-service vacation destinations that combine meeting & convention facilities with America’s largest indoor water parks. Their website is a key tool for interacting with their guests and helping future guests plan their perfect vacation, meeting, or event.
Finding a new website support partner after a bad experience
In 2017, a failed website development project with another local web development company left Kalahari’s digital marketing team searching for a new development partner during one of their busiest times of the year. Luckily, they found Emergent Software ready to pick up the pieces and carry the project through to completion with the level of urgency the situation required. The development activity of their Umbraco CMS website was transitioned to Emergent Software in days, and the project was quickly completed within a month from the transition. Emergent Software has since been Kalahari’s exclusive web development partner, enhancing the site regularly and ensuring it performs like the valuable business asset it has become.
Emergent Software and Kalahari have since worked together on an ongoing continuous development basis, mainly focused on two areas: disaster recovery planning & prevention and overall improvement of the site’s user experience.
Scaling the site to accommodate an influx of traffic & developing a disaster recovery plan
A critical area of focus for the Kalahari team regarding their website is centered around crisis management and disaster recovery. Kalahari tends to see increased traffic to their website during specific high-travel times or after a specific marketing campaign goes live and has seen even more demand for their services since the onset of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The website has experienced more traffic than they ever have before and they needed their site to continue to perform well under an increase in users.
Emergent Software and Kalahari have worked together to help scale Kalahari’s servers to handle the increased amount of traffic to the site without diminishing a user’s experience, all while making sure the increase in hosting costs stays within the team’s budget. Our team has been able to put together a plan of action to adjust server infrastructure (which is hosted on Microsoft Azure) to ensure that the site can handle increased amounts of traffic. Our team has also helped Kalahari build a disaster recovery plan in the event that their site experiences an outage. This plan will help the team to minimize loss of their data and to continue providing site visitors with the information they need.
Enhancing the overall user experience
In addition to disaster recovery planning and prevention, Emergent Software has helped Kalahari pursue a number of initiatives all related to improving a user’s experience on the site. A few highlights include:
- Ensuring compliance with GDPR privacy laws
- Enhancing the site’s mobile experience
- Increasing site accessibility on a variety of platforms
- Adding features to translate the entire website into multiple languages
- Enhanced spam filtering
Emergent Software has been Kalahari’s trusted website development partner since 2017. The Kalahari team is excited about their continued partnership with Emergent Software to develop, maintain, and improve their website to help support their business goals and generate revenue.
