eWaterways projects

Small Ships Register

2008 to-date

ASP.NET MVC (C#), CSS, SQL Server, Flash, JQuery, LINQ to SQL, WCF

ssr.ewaterways.com

The Small Ships Register was the first of the websites we delivered. The purpose of the site is to provide a portal to allow boat owners to market their vessels to a global audience and manage the distribution of their ships through the eWaterways.com website.

Altitude's approach was to first understand the requirements. The creation of different use cases helped this process enormously. These use cases were used as a basis to form the site's wireframes which enabled the client to begin to visualise the site and its structure. When completed, the wireframes were passed to our designers who got to work with not only the company branding but also the site design.

With the site design agreed, we were able to turn the static designs into a fully operational website which allows both ship owners and eWaterways staff to manage the ship information.

Consumer website

2008 to-date

Umbraco CMS, ASP.NET (C#), CSS, Flash, JQuery, SQL Server, XML Web services

www.ewaterways.com

The consumer site originally started life based on an existing bookable website that eWaterways had acquired which we modified to fit in with eWaterway's requirements. This interim site had its limitations and was soon superseded by a fully bookable consumer website that Altitude developed during 2009.

The consumer site is designed to show off the product content (taken from the Small Ships Register) and to make the booking process as easy as possible. This was quite a challenge as the product options are more complicated than traditional travel products. Rather than build a booking engine from scratch, a decision was made to integrate with a 3rd party booking engine via an XML API.

Since inception the site is constantly evolving with hotel booking capability, a new Content Management System, integration with the PayPal payment engine and plans to release a multi-lingual version.

Travel Agent Portal

2009 to-date

ASP.NET MVC (C#), CSS, SQL Server, Flash, JQuery, LINQ to SQL, WCF

agents.ewaterways.com

Based on the consumer website, the Travel Agent portal was developed to allow travel agents to book eWaterways' products and claim back commission payments. Functionally the agent portal is very similar to the consumer site, but with the ability to control which products are available and the commission levels payable to each travel agent.

The site allows customers to view the product content (taken from the Small Ships Register) and make bookings online. Rather than build a booking engine from scratch, the website integrates with a 3rd party booking engine API.

Whitelabel Framework

2009 to-date

ASP.NET MVC (C#), CSS, SQL Server, Flash, JQuery, LINQ to SQL, WCF

See an example site at finetravel.ewaterways.com

In order to allow eWaterways to offer whitelabel websites for B2B and B2C travel agents, it was necessary to create a whitelabel framework to make this process manageable.

Altitude developed a client configurable system that allows the travel agents to set the look and feel of their site, once created. At least 50 whitelabel sites have been created to-date.

The whitelabel framework is constantly improving, with new functionality being added all the time.