Patchrobe

The Mountain Echo is the local english language publication covering the alpine resorts of Val d'Isere, Tignes and Meribel.

Having been in existence for over four years, many thousands of articles, photos and other data (such as local telephone directory information) had already been generated in print form and the administrative overhead had brought several previous efforts to bring this publication to the internet to eventual failure.

Using PDF copies used in the printing process, Patchrobe was engaged in the process of making the content of the magazine web ready, integrating an advertising server (in this case OpenX) and porting the data into a content management system (in this case Drupal).

As well as simply creating web pages and uploading photos, some interesting data challenges were met and resolved. Instead of merely uploading directory information as pages or splicing the existing map database into the content management system a more elegant solution was found. Map and directory information was entered into a custom node type created using the Drupal Content Creation Kit. Further, the map data, created by Patchrobe using the Google Maps API was ported from it;s existing database into Drupal programatically saving on weeks of laborious data entry.

Further significant search engine optimisation was carried out on data that was already appearing in seventh place on a search for "Val d'Isere" in www.google.co.uk (on 31st May 2009). We expect the results over the next few months, as the digitisation and graphic design process continues, to be impressive...