Web design & CMS

The web design capabilities of TourCMS are one if its key strengths vs competitor products.

Text content, HTML content (including fonts, CSS stylesheets, tables, bold etc) can be managed within the application, alongside the dates, prices & availability data associated with online bookings and bookings management.

Web pages are built around HTML (or XHTML) templates - 100% configurable by any web designer. TourCMS tags are replaced when pages are rebuilt, and the generated pages are transferred via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to your own web hosting. As the secure transactions (online booking) take place on our secured central data centre, your web hosting technology requirements are minimal.

Manage the full website, or just use TourCMS to manage individual pages
Create a navigation architecture (IA) with extensive tour categorisation capabilities
Ensures your website is consistent with your other sales channels - and selling the same products at the same prices
Once the templates are setup ongoing management of your site will not need constant web designer work - you will be able to change descriptions, add and remove tours, change dates & prices without any technical knowledge
Expired dates & prices automatically removed from your site
Define URLs for each page managed by TourCMS, leading to your own directory structures (ideal for search engine optimisation)

Multiple website example
Multiple websites can be managed from the same account. For example if you have tours in France, Spain and Italy - you could produce 3 individual websites - each marketed directly to interested customers. Each website would only have relevant tours on. Alongside these indivdiual sites you could also run a central website - with all tours from all 3 countries presented.

If you change a price or description, this will be reflected on the other sites.

You can have individual booking engines (branded to each website) for each site - or you can share a central booking engine. All bookings will go to your central bookings administration account, and availability - even when sold via one site - will be updated on others.

Tag example
Within TourCMS or within an external web page editor, page templates are created & edited. These templates combine HTML with the TourCMS tags. When the site is rebuilt, the tags are stripped out of the templates and are replaced with actual data. The final pages are then FTPed to your webserver in their final position.

Element tags

<$TourCMStour output="t_name"$>
<$TourCMSdeparture output="d_offer_price"$>

Container tags

<TourCMSlist_departures orderby="offer_datetime" order="desc"
bookable="show" has_offer="show" maxdisplay="3">

Attributes
The example above, TourCMSlist_departures, is a container tag that lists departures. Extra requirements can be defined using attributes. These attributes enable the web designer to dictate exactly what data should be returned. In the example above we have used:

orderby - what to order the departures by. In this case the order is by date that the special offer was created
order - whether the order should be ascending or descending. In this case the order is to show the latest special offer
bookable - just show departures that are not closed or reached maximum bookings
has_offer - just show departures that have special offers
maxdisplay - how many departures to show. In this case show 3 departures

Combining container tags with element tags
The power of the tags system increases when container tags are combined with element tags.

<TourCMSlist_departures orderby="offer_datetime" order="desc"
bookable="show" has_offer="show" maxdisplay="3">

<$TourCMStour output="t_name"$>

</TourCMSlist_departures>

The above example encloses an element tag with a container tag. The container tag repeats its contents for each departure that has a special offer. The element tag itself is a tag to display the tour name. We could end up with a list of 3 tour names like this:

  Luxury Paris
  Luxury London
  Luxury Amsterdam

In addition we could add an extra element tag to display the special offer price:

<TourCMSlist_departures orderby="offer_datetime" order="desc"
bookable="show" has_offer="show" maxdisplay="3">

<$TourCMStour output="t_name"$>
<$TourCMSdeparture output="d_offer_price"$>
</TourCMSlist_departures>

In our example this would create a list of tour names and offer prices such as:

  Luxury Paris 500
  Luxury London 300
  Luxury Amsterdam 200

Building a table in HTML
Most of the time we will want to display this information in HTML rather than as a text list. The following example shows how the tags will integrate with HTML within the page templates:

<table cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2" border="1">
<TourCMSlist_departures orderby="offer_datetime" order="desc"
bookable="show" has_offer="show" maxdisplay="3">

<tr><td><$TourCMStour output="t_name"$></td>
<td><$TourCMSdeparture output="d_offer_price"$></td></tr>

</TourCMSlist_departures>
</table>

Which creates:

<table cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2" border="1">
<tr><td>Luxury Paris</td><td>500</td></tr>
<tr><td>Luxury London</td><td>300</td></tr>
<tr><td>Luxury Amsterdam</td><td>200</td></tr>
</table>

... and displays as:

Luxury Paris	500
Luxury London	300
Luxury Amsterdam	200

The HTML for each table row is repeated when each new line is added.

Summary
There are many container and element tags that can be used within TourCMS. These include content such as options, tours, dates, prices, pieces of HTML content from the inbuilt HTML editor etc. The web designer in full control over the presentation of the data and the travel company is in full control of the data itself.

This means that once the templates have been setup, the travel company can change their website without having to have any HTML knowledge.

Learn more about web design in the web design manual or review the TourCMS solution library for some ideas

Web design manual (& booking engine integration)

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