“ We’ve had many people thank us for the new site, particularly the visually impaired, because the site allows them more independence in traveling. It’s a good feeling to know we’re having a positive impact on the lives of our customers. „

- Kirsten Koppang Telford, eCommunications Consultant, TransLink

Challenge

TransLink is Metro Vancouver’s regional transportation authority, serving 22 municipalities and 2.5 million people. TransLink is the first North American transportation authority to be responsible for the planning, financing and managing of all public transit, in addition to major regional roads and bridges. They are responsible for regional transit, cycling and commuting options, as well as AirCare, Intelligent Transportation System programs and the Major Road Network.

The web site has three main purposes:

• Providing customer service information to the 2.5 million people in Metro Vancouver, along with the millions of tourists that visit Vancouver each year
• Providing corporate information to partners and stakeholders
• Providing an effective way to engage the public in ongoing public consultations

Previously, the site was heavily focused on providing corporate information to partners and stakeholders. However, TransLink’s business has evolved and the goal was to make available more information to support riders’ use of the transportation network in order to help them make better transportation decisions. As a result, the website’s primary focus shifted from being mostly internally facing to an external focus that better serves TransLink’s valued customers and stakeholders.

TransLink had been using Marquis to manage site content, which, according to Kirsten Koppang Telford, Partner at Cogeny-RGS, and TransLink’s Project Manager on the site build, it was suboptimal.  “The content was being managed by TransLink’s web team and, in some cases, Marquis was too difficult, so they were just creating HTML pages. We needed a more flexible, easy-to-use system.  The primary business objective was to develop a highly consumer-facing site, aligned more closely to the brand and fully accessible under W3C guidelines. The key to enhancing TransLink’s technology platform was the selection and implementation of a content management system (CMS) that enables TransLink to quickly and easily update our site. In addition, our mission was to improve a number of key applications, promote online consultation and create an extensible site that can elegantly scale over time. This was a tall mission and we needed a powerful CMS.”

Solution

TransLink’s website redesign goals included:

• An easy-to-use CMS: Previously the workflow was bottlenecked since only one or two people could use the system
• Improved site design: TransLink needed a consistent look and feel throughout the site, and an improved navigation that would allow site visitors to find what they needed quickly.
• Flexible workflow: TransLink is made up of several subsidiaries so they aggregate customer information for all of those services. The new CMS had to have an accommodating workflow.
• Ability to integrate seamlessly with other technologies: Most of TransLink’s traffic uses Trapeze for trip planning information, so TransLink needed to integrate Trapeze as seamlessly as possible — to manage traffic flow into that system and back into Sitecore pages.
• Accessibility: It was very important to create a site that would be fully accessible for the visually impaired.

TransLink chose Tribal DDB and FCV to help them with the website overhaul. Tribal DDB was chosen for their ability to unearth consumer insights and map them to intelligent and strategic design solutions.  FCV was selected based on their solid technical development abilities, along with their experience with travel planning applications. Working with both Tribal DDB and FCV, TransLink evaluated various CMS solutions, and Sitecore was chosen based on the following:

• The ability of Sitecore to transparently integrate with other technologies, including MOSS and Sharepoint
• Functionality and flexibility of Sitecore, including the accessibility compliance — which was important to TransLink
• Sitecore’s experience with other transportation sites and its strong customer references

The site was redesigned and built to be fully accessible, per the W3C (WAI Level 2).  Tribal and FCV also built a customized widget for feeding information back into the trip planner, and live traffic camera feeds have also been integrated into the site. They also created a tagging system for documents, which allows internal and external users to quickly search for .PDF documents in the document library.

“We focused on bringing greater utility to the site, after research identified three core areas of functionality that TransLink riders’ require: a fast and easy way to get transit details; quick links to fares and schedules; and multi-modal trip planning,” says Amber Bezahler, Managing Director of Tribal DDB Vancouver. “Sitecore made it possible for TransLink to develop intelligent organizational workflows and update their site with ease. From a customer-facing perspective, the infinitely configurable Sitecore templates allowed for a site with optimal usability.“

Result

The new site went live, and the traffic has remained steady with 800,000 visits per month. Since launch, the site has realized a 12.5% decrease in bounce rate confirming visitors who arrive at the homepage easily find information they seek.

Content that previously lived deeper in the site, such as Transit Maps and Fares & Passes, has received more than double the number of visits than the same period the year before in their new positioning on the site. The time spent on these get-in-and-get-out type pages has decreased by almost half, from 3:51 min to 1:55 min. This implies more users are getting the valuable information they need faster and getting on with their transit trip, rather than experiencing frustration at not being able to find critical trip planning information.

Overall, there has been a 25% increase in time spent on site over the same period in 2008. Visitors are spending less time on utility-based pages yet more time on content-rich pages. Overall, customers are finding more valuable content with which to interact.

And just as importantly, TransLink has been able to do a much better job of organizing content on the backend so it’s much easier to manage, update and share with other systems.  The feedback has been very positive, especially from the general public. Says Koppang Telford, “We’ve had many people thank us for the new site, particularly the visually impaired, because the site allows them more independence in traveling. It’s a good feeling to know we’re having a positive impact on the lives of our customers.”

“I’ve been building websites for 15 years, and knowing the size and scale of the project, and having seen the previous site, I knew that the right CMS was going to be key to the success of this initiative,” says Derek Whyte, VP of Client Services at FCV Technologies. “Building the TransLink site with Sitecore has been hugely successful — and is a project of which TransLink should be proud.”

Translink has recently added blogs and forums to the site, and they plan to continue to add more Web 2.0 functionality, and make the site more mobile friendly -- which will be a great asset with the upcoming Olympic games. 

Technical Description

Solution Special Ingredients

• Google Maps
• Google Analytics
• Coveo search engine
• Sitecore blogs and forums