Redesigning and developing a bilingual multi-content website

The New Zealand Chinese Jockey Club is New Zealand’s FIRST professional equine related agency for the Chinese community, adhering to the concept of friends making through horse racing activities and developing new business opportunities.

NZCJC had approached us for helping them to rebuild their old Wordpress website. We found there're a few critical issues on the old site.

The first problem came on our attention was their unmaintainable CMS setup, several different content types including their translated version saved under the same post type. Furthermore, all post content is hard coded with page builder.

Another significant problem is the slow loading performance which caused by the page builder generated heavy nested markup, big list of request during page load, and non-optimised images. There were some UX issues including non-mobile friendly design and inconsistent navigation menu on different pages. Also, the old site did not have proper on-page SEO.

Not to mention that the Wordpress core, plugins and template are all dated, plus there was no security and backup strategy implemented.

With all the above problem plus new feature request in mind, we decided to rebuild the whole website from scratch which will be faster and cost-effective.

As a content-driven project which will be managed by multiple editors which different role sets, we put lots of effort on their backend to create an editor friendly, simple to use and organised data with Wordpress CMS.

We created unique post types for each of their content type, including blog post, event, syndication and gallery, which has their own set of custom fields for each post type.

Front-end wise, we designed and developed the website with the mobile-first approach and responsive design. We implemented auto image optimisation, use lightweight plugins, and minimised resource request on page load to hit the top-notch performance.

We have also implemented on-page SEO, which including apply proper title and meta description, open graph data, schema, etc. to help to boost their Google ranking and get more organic visitors.

We work closely as a team with NZCJC employees in an agile approach to capture their real need and study their business so that we can deliver a product that can add value to their business. At the end of the project, we have organised a few training session to hand over the product to NZCJC.

We have also offered an on-going maintenance plan to NZCJC, which help to take care of all their website technical aspect so that the NZCJC team can focus on delivering good content.

The new website is now current fully loaded in approx. 1 sec which is a significant 500% improvement compares to the old 5-6 seconds loading time. Also, the website is now having a better user experience for mobile and tablet users. There are some keywords ranked on the first Google search result page, few of them even ranked first.