November 2018

Release Notes December 9, 2018

Microformats to boost your website SEO

We’ve recently upgraded all our travel website templates to have SEO-rich microformats, also called structured-data, by default. You don’t have to do anything extra. Just keep uploading your tours, activities, & packages via our CMS, and automagically get the following microformats on all published webpages:

What are microformats / structured-data? Why does this matter?

Microformats (or “structured data”) are snippets of special code inserted on a web-page to help Google (and other search engines) understand the content of a page at a much deeper level. It is generally accepted that presence of such microformats boosts your search rankings.

For example, if your page has content about a tour, microformats can help Google understand the price of your tour, which it then displays on the Google search results page.

Similarly, hierarchy (or organization) of content on your travel website, can be communicated to Google via “breadcrumbs” which, again, show up on the Google search results page. This even helps in discoverability of related content by end-users, not Google alone.

Breadcrumbs on all travel website templates

Apart from microformats, which are visible only to search-engines, we’ve also upgraded all our travel website templates to show breadcrumbs that are visible to end-users. This usually helps users in navigating your website easily. It also helps in the discovery of related content. For example, if a user lands directly on the tour page of “Chadar trek” after searching on Google, the breadcrumbs help in discovery of the “Himalayan treks” collection.

Storefront

You need to enable user-visible breadcrumbs from the backoffice by going to Website > SEO & Analytics Settings.

Backoffice

Google Search Console integration

You can now create your Google Search Console account and verify your website ownership (required to activate your Google Search Console account), with just a few clicks. We highly recommend that you do this because it gives you a lot of insight about how Google is indexing content on your website and if it encounters any errors, spam, or other issues.


Better arrangement of sections on tour pages

Apart from the standard sections on tour pages – i.e. overview, highlights, inclusions, exclusions, terms & conditions, and detailed itinerary – we had the ability to add more sections by adding custom-fields to each tour. However, this worked well only for shorter pieces of content, like, “Recommended for”, or “Best time to travel”, because of the way this showed up on the tour page.

We have now added the ability to specify which custom-fields get an independent section on the tour page. Now this works well for larger content sections, like “Route map”, “Visa documentation”, or “Available accommodation options”

Storefront

Along with this, we have also added the ability to reorder sections on tour pages. Both these options are accessible from the backoffice: Website > Pages > Tour details page.

Backoffice

Reordering photos in a tour’s photo gallery

We have added the ability to reorder photos added to a tour’s photo gallery. This is especially useful if you have a multi-day itinerary and would like the photos in the gallery to sync with the day-wise itinerary of the tour.

Backoffice

Improvements to the website builder

Option to add multiple address sections to a page.

Backoffice

This is helpful if you have more than three physical addresses and would like to organize them better.

Storefront
On mobile devices, the booking form wasn’t showing the tour’s name until the last step – “Review & Payment”. This has been fixed now and the tour’s name is visible on all steps of the booking form.

We had messed up a few icons while upgrading a CSS library – most notably the “current slide” icon on the homepage slider. This has now been fixed.

Bug-fixes and minor improvements

We have upgraded the Payfort payment gateway integration to the latest version, where the payment form (which collects credit card details) is hosted on our servers itself. Please note, the credit card details are sent directly to Payfort and never touch our servers.
Rich-text editors in the backoffice were breaking whenever the “full-screen” (or “maximize”) option was used. This has been fixed.
Fixed a bug due to which it was not possible to upload files with certain names to the root directory.
Scheduled daily accounting report was showing entries from the start date of an account’s booking engine subscription. This has been fixed and the daily report now contains last day’s data only.
We have fixed an error which prevented internal notes, booking comments, or booking language from being edited via the backoffice if mandatory fields in the booking or passenger form were missing.
Fixed mixed content errors in the back office, which was resulting in “insecure” site message.
Transactional emails (like the confirmation email, cancellation email, etc) weren’t linking to the general booking terms & conditions properly. This has been fixed.

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