Acorn Educational Exchanges is one of the UK’s leading ABTA/ATOL-bonded specialist School Tour Operators. They pride themselves on offering high quality, highly flexible residential language courses in the country of origin. Their parent company, Halsbury Travel, already had a site, but they were looking to create a direct booking site for the burgeoning AEEL side of the business.

AEEL’s market is overshadowed by Cactus Languages amongst other major language course specialists. The site needed to be able to meet the level of presentation within these competitor sites, and offer a comparable alternative, that would be easy to navigate. A large part of the booking process for language courses was spent filling in forms, and AEEL’s perspective, this could mean 15-20 minutes writing up the paperwork during a phone call, for it to be sent on for processing internally.

The site needed to be able to remove a large part of this administrative task, by having the user/customer create their own record and select their choices from a booking form, then send via the site’s server directly to relevant personnel within the company for processing further.

It was essential that the entire site could be updated and maintained by AEEL staff, without further cost, meaning that they wanted it to be driven entirely by a content management system (CMS) that allowed flexibility that they had previously only dreamed of.

The position of the site in search engine-ranked results was a concern for the AEEL team too, so specific assistance was required from Skylight Media in this regard.

AEELanguages.co.uk uses a combination of programming languages to achieve the required objective, of a simple-to-navigate, simple-to-use site from both a user and administrator perspective.

The site is incredibly easy to use. A visitor is able to enter the site and access the booking section from any page, and also jump ahead if they are on one of the pages within the booking process already.

The steps to booking are highly intuitive and encourage completion of the booking form with the minimum of clicks, for what is normally such a complex process.

Behind the scenes, there is a massive Content Management System (CMS) developed as a bespoke solution for AEEL. This enables them to add in new languages, schools, dates, offers and descriptions, along with all other pages within the site’s structure.

Additionally, the site needed to be flexible enough to allow AEEL to change Meta descriptions and keywords on the pages to help them to carry out their own Search Engine Optimisation tasks.

All orders, brochure requests and enquiries are handled through the site. Confirmations are sent automatically via email, freeing up administration time for the AEEL team. Any text content can be added, edited or deleted, thereby keeping the contents up-to-date with the minimum of fuss.

Access is made via a username and password, and allows only specific people to make changes within the structure. All orders are collected into one section and are identified as ‘successful’, ‘pending’, or ‘failed’ (according to payment status) and the appropriate emails are sent automatically by the site, to the customer and AEEL, negating the need for additional correspondence to be entered into.

This project was completed within an extremely short lead time, under AEEL’s strict deadline. It is easy to navigate and book courses through, and the Skylight-developed content management system (CMS) is very easy to use. The client is delighted with the support we have provided throughout the project and the results since launch have exceeded their expectations. See Niall’s testimonial, here.