Azamara, a small-ship cruise line best known as the leader in Destination Immersion®, was tasked with transitioning its entire IT infrastructure to a completely new technology stack. In response, the company undertook the development of two new websites within 18 months. One website was designed for consumer engagement (B2C) and the other for business partnerships (B2B). This initiative was part of a broader effort to update and separate Azamara’s IT systems, ensuring independent functionality for both customer and business interactions. Tasked with creating these sites from the ground up, ArgonDigital set out to craft an online presence that attracted first-time customers and resonated with the brand’s loyal following.
Thesis
Our team utilized its expertise in requirements analysis and software development to master the intricacies of Azamara’s unique business challenges. By partnering with multiple Azamara teams and harnessing various technologies, we meticulously constructed two distinct websites—one for business-to-business interactions and another for direct consumer engagement via marketing and product discovery. This strategic development allowed Azamara to not only convey its brand identity effectively but also to ensure a smooth handoff to Seaware TouchX which handles the guest booking user experience.
Challenge 1: Crafting the Front-End
Azamara was keen on a marketing site that would seamlessly integrate with their Seaware TouchX booking platform. This meant creating a front-end from scratch using CrafterCMS that would not only be visually appealing but also highly functional, incorporating a tapestry of integrations between online forms, interactive itinerary maps, product bookings, and more. The ArgonDigital team worked with a handful of Azamara departments to ensure the brand’s voice echoed loudly and clearly in every pixel and user interaction.
Solution 1: A Seamless Fusion of Design and Function
ArgonDigital engaged in a close partnership with Azamara’s design firm, collaboratively developing design directives that balanced aesthetic appeal with user-friendly content management for Azamara’s authors. This collaborative effort resulted in a design that resonated with the brand’s identity and was easily manageable for regular content updates. Our skilled team of engineers then meticulously implemented this design, ensuring an effective integration into Azamara’s digital presence.
Next, we enhanced the user experience by integrating key systems with Azamara’s site content. We implemented a CrafterCMS-based API to streamline the process of transferring years’ worth of comprehensive cruise and shore excursion data from Seaware’s GraphQL API into CrafterCMS, enabling dynamic content generation, including detailed cruise information and itineraries. This data flow not only populated the site with rich content but also contributed to enhancing a smooth transition into the booking platform. Further, by incorporating MapBox, we were able to provide interactive destination maps on cruise detail pages, enriching the customer’s planning journey. In addition, we executed a major integration with Okta for efficient guest authentication and synchronized with HubSpot to manage and fetch client data, enhancing the functionality of help and contact forms. The combination of these integrations resulted in a cohesive user experience consistent with the Azamara brand.
In the process of crafting Azamara’s new online presence, we meticulously evaluated the content for migration and decided not to transfer everything wholesale but to discern which elements required a fresh start on the new platform. Using custom-developed scripts alongside custom CrafterCMS API endpoints, all existing Azamara blogs and news articles were smoothly transitioned from the legacy system, ensuring historical content remained accessible. In conjunction, SEO support was bolstered by setting up strategic redirects. This ensured that valuable pages didn’t fall into the Internet’s void but continued to strengthen Azamara’s digital footprint. When URLs changed—such as moving from “/destinations” to “/places to see”—the team implemented redirects to maintain any existing valuable SEO rankings and prevent any 404 errors, effectively mapping old paths to new journeys. Lastly, we incorporated proper meta information, page titles, and page structure omitted on the previous site to improve SEO further.
Challenge 2: Overhauling the Back-End
The back-end upgrade posed a substantial challenge as we aimed to streamline Azamara’s internal processes around product management and cruise bookings. The previous website required a high degree of manual input; every new cruise addition or page update demanded a developer’s intervention to get things off the ground. Content creation, particularly with the challenge of handling more than 100 deployments each year, was not just repetitive but also incredibly time-consuming, resulting in substantial inefficiencies for the team.
Moreover, the customization of itinerary maps for each cruise page previously involved painstaking hand-drawn efforts. This meticulous process, although detailed, was far from efficient.
Addressing the distinct needs of the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) websites added another layer of complexity. Although structurally similar, the two platforms served different purposes. The B2B site served as a crucial platform for travel agents, offering comprehensive support for selling Azamara cruises. It provided access to brand information, marketing kits, training resources, and exclusive offers. Additionally, it facilitated direct access to the Seaware reservation platform. On the other hand, the B2C site was designed to empower customers to explore and book cruises independently, a functionality that highlighted the need for a more intuitive and self-sufficient interface.
Solution 2: Engineering for Simplicity and Elegance
In our solution for Azamara’s back-end, we introduced a paradigm shift towards shared content elements that could be used in different areas of the site while having a single place to author the content. We drafted requirements and developed content components and full templates using CrafterCMS, a content management system designed for maximum reusability. Allowing the content team to independently set up pages and components, even for complex new offerings like cruise ships, with minimal or no need for developer assistance.
The B2B and B2C websites benefit from this shared content approach, significantly reducing duplication of efforts while still accommodating the need for some custom components. And, the versatility of CrafterCMS ensured that these efficiencies are effectively applied to both web and mobile site versions, providing a consistent user experience with minimal additional effort.
The creation of maps, a task that once took days of manual data plotting/drawing/iteration, now only requires a few hours thanks to the shift to programmatically generated content. This automation takes existing cruise data and plots it onto MapBox datasets, leaving only the drawing of the connecting route lines and labeling of ports to human hands. This approach was proven in a proof-of-concept that received enthusiastic feedback from the Azamara team and was later showcased to great acclaim at the Azamara cruise conference in Miami.
Lastly, the integration of HubSpot was another key element of the solution, enabling the marketing and customer service teams to manage user data directly within the HubSpot back-end, resulting in a seamless experience for users on the front end. This integration ensures that no guest data is stored within CrafterCMS, aligning with privacy and data management best practices.
Conclusion
ArgonDigital successfully delivered two fully operational websites that not only elevated Azamara’s brand but also revolutionized the front-end and back-end user experience. Thanks to the harmonious convergence of design, technology, and strategic thinking, stakeholders now navigate a site that showcases the brand’s mission of going above and beyond the traditional cruise experience. Azamara’s new online presence stands as a testament to the power of innovation and partnership in creating seamless customer journeys on the digital ocean.
