Tourism

Freelock were very helpful and supportive in helping me realize my vision for a website. They have deep technical expertise, and are capable of delivering on advanced features and functionality. They also have a genuine, longer-term commitment to making your website a success, and are always on-hand to provide great suggestions.

Freelock was approached to build a website focused on the “Top 50” Day Trips from Seattle, based on rankings and reviews from users. Cooldaytrips.com includes a description of each destination, photos, driving distances, accommodation, restaurants and activities. For those wishing to stay longer than a day, the site also includes recommendations on Extended Trips.  It’s an extremely useful resource for those planning a trip in the the Pacific Northwest and Washington State.

As the coordinator for the Olympic Peninsula Tourism Commission, I direct staff and contractors in projects for the OPTC, including the contractor selection, design and build of the new website. Freelock was chosen and did the work as expected with great results. I heartily recommend them for other work of this nature. Their customer service and personal approach sets them apart from the crowd.

Planning a vacation is tough. Between the pain of finding a hotel or final destination, booking an airline, and locating information on things to do, one could spend days online surfing from website to website searching for items that may or may not be correct and/or relevant.

Isn't a vacation supposed to relaxing? Shouldn't planning and booking a vacation be as relaxing? 

I think so.

The Olympic Peninsula Tourism Board came to us in early 2009 to assist them in developing a visually stunning and highly functional website in a Content Management System. The site needed to be flexible enough to be managed by the 12 partners of the OPTC represented by local Chamber of Commerces. This meant the system needed to not only be able of handling complex permissions, but also easy to use and train new members. That being said, we recommended the use Drupal because of it highly flexible theme capabilities and content management superiority over platforms such as Joomla. 

I get this question all the time: What's the difference between Drupal and Ruby on Rails, or another framework?

Quite simply, Rails is something you build an application in. Drupal is an application. So chances are you're one major step closer to building a web site that does what you want it to do, if you start with Drupal.

When the Olympic Peninsula Tourism Commission came to Freelock Computing to convert their static HTML site into a newly designed, Drupal-driven CMS, I'm not going to lie, a few drops of drool fell from my mouth. We tend to label ourselves a little outdoorsy and most of us love to travel, so the opportunity to design and build a website in our neck of the woods that we could not only explore new methods such as Geo-mapping but also actually use as normal visitors was exciting.