Site Purpose
The transport system of the Greater Melbourne region contains the world's largest tram network, over 300 bus routes, and several train networks. As in many large cities, public transport is provided by a number of different organisations and this can make it difficult to use for residents and visitors alike. The Metlink Melbourne website provides a unified public transport website for the city of 4 million people with official routes, timetables, fares, news, and service disruption notices. Metlink Melbourne experiences significant spikes during service disruptions, the Melbourne Cup, and the Australian Open and is (along with its Sydney equivalent) one of the two busiest public transport websites in Australia.
What We Did
- Ported the website from an aging platform to the SilverStripe CMS, as the first stage of a multiple-year plan to enhance the website.
- Improved uptime, response time, and capacity to serve more traffic, while at the same reducing the production environment from 6 to 4 servers.
- Put in place systems to ensure the website can be updated during high traffic spikes.
- Integrated the website with existing journey-planning and timetabling software. A two-way flow of information between the systems was set up.
- Helped in-house IT staff acquire SilverStripe development skills through secondment and remote training. This allows greater control and responsibility within Metlink.
- Improved the internal website used by the call centre to answer timetable and journey-planning enquiries.
- Preserved the website's original URLs and set up automatic redirects to SilverStripe's human-readable, friendly URLs.
What Users Can Do Now
This project had an infrastructure focus and an important project goal was to move the website to SilverStripe without the public knowing there had been a change. What users do notice now is an improved search system that makes content easier to find and, importantly, that the website remains up even when under the strain of high traffic.
Measures of Success
- Completed a complex CMS migration project within a short timeframe. Metlink went from researching the CMS market in September 2008 to our work being ready to launch by Christmas.
- Impressed Metlink staff with how smoothly the production server was switched to SilverStripe on the day of go-live.
- Metlink's non-technical communications staff can perform most website changes themselves, and no longer need to involve IT staff for small changes.
- Metlink's web development and IT staff now have greater control over their website.
- Metlink can now focus on the next stages of the website development: improving the user interface, creating a mobile version, and allowing greater personalisation and services to frequent public transport users.
