Fáilte Ireland’s Discover Ireland website has been chosen as Site of the Year 2011 award winner, by Kentico Software, one of the world’s leading web content management system providers.  The Discover Ireland website (www.discoverireland.ie) was announced as global winner out of nearly 200 entries.

The challenge for the discoverireland.ie redesign project, undertaken in 2011, was to incorporate a system with greater functionality and flexibility, a range of workflows to allow for various levels of content editors, and incorporation of third party web services whilst creating a clean but aesthetically pleasing user interface, adhering to strict brand guidelines.

Advanced functionalities of the website include: drag-and-drop; in-context editing; a WYSIWYG editor; social media connectivity with Facebook and Twitter; wide use of native web parts; and bespoke web-parts and widgets, in particular tied into the Fáilte Ireland Tourism Content System (TCS).

TCS stores in excess of 15,000 tourist items, including accommodation, activities, attractions and events. The content is geocoded, which allowed widgets to be developed for displaying walking routes, tourist item locations, and plotted search results. A custom search widget was also developed, allowing content customisation and multi-level filtering.

Orla Carroll, Fáilte Ireland’s Head of Marketing and eBusiness said:“We are delighted that discoverireland.ie has been recognised as best-in-class among the 12,000 websites that operate using Kentico world-wide.  The hard work does not stop here though, as the web is constantly evolving and we are constantly researching and implementing improvements to the user experience on discoverireland.ie and our other websites.”