Orange DMC

Orange DMC is a destination management company that plans private journeys across India, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, Indochina and Japan. We are rebuilding its website and we run a private portal for the travel agents who sell its trips.

What was the problem?

Orange DMC designs trips on the ground in Asia and sells them through travel agents and directly to travellers. The website is where both first see a destination, read an itinerary and decide to ask for a plan. It also carries Orang-ED Experiences, which plans educational travel for schools and colleges.

The live site runs on WordPress with Elementor. It looks good, and the team did not want that to change. The problems sat underneath:

• Pages carry large videos and images, so they are slow on a phone, which is where most travellers first look.
• Most pages had no meta description and no structured data, and many images had no alt text. That hurts both search and accessibility.
• Changing a page meant working inside a page builder, so small edits waited for someone technical.
• There was no French version, which a French partner had asked for.
• Travel agents had no private place to browse trips and ask for quotes, so enquiries arrived as loose emails.

What did we do for the website?

We are rebuilding it as a website migration with one rule: the visitor should not notice. Same addresses, same design, same behaviour, on a platform the Orange DMC team can edit.

• A CMS the team controls. Pages, destinations, itineraries and blog posts live in Payload CMS as blocks. Editors change text, images and links themselves, and saving a page refreshes it on the site.
• Every old address kept. We tested every old address, including the odd WordPress ones such as numbered page links and attachment pages. Each one either loads or redirects once to the right page, so search rankings and bookmarks are not thrown away.
• The behaviour people notice. The five-step travel planner, enquiry forms, carousels, the menu popup and the background music toggle all work as they do today.
• A French version. French pages sit under their own address with the right language tags. A visitor from France sees a small suggestion to switch and is never redirected. The French copy comes from Orange DMC's own writers in Word files, which we import page by page. We did not write any of it.
• Search basics. Titles and descriptions, social sharing tags, structured data, a sitemap per language and image descriptions. This is the base for search and answer visibility, and we will measure it before and after the switch.

What does the partner portal do for travel agents?

The portal lives at partners.orangedmc.com. It is a private workspace for Orange DMC's approved travel agents, kept apart from the public site. From what its public sign-in page shows, an agent can browse itineraries, send a structured enquiry instead of a loose email, and follow the quotes that come back, all in one place.

Access is by approval only. An agent asks for access, and the Orange DMC team reviews every registration by hand. The portal is hidden from search engines. It runs as its own Next.js application with its own database and background workers on Orange DMC's server, and it sends email from the portal's own domain. This is application development for a business that sells through partners.

How did we run it?

We split the rebuild into milestones: an audit of the live site, architecture, importing content, building page types, French and search, then QA and handover. Each milestone ended with a review before the next began. The live WordPress site was treated as read-only throughout.

QA compares every page with the live site at four screen widths. A few mobile and tablet layouts on the destination pages are still being matched, and we say so. The site is packaged as one container with nightly database and media backups. A password-protected QA site runs on Orange DMC's own server beside the live one, hidden from search engines, so the team can review without touching what travellers see.

What changed?

• orangedmc.com is still the WordPress site. The rebuild runs on QA and staging, and we will switch it over when Orange DMC approves.
• The French version is built and waiting for French copy.
• The partner portal is live, and its sign-in page is public.
• Speed, search and enquiry results: [RESULT TO CONFIRM]. Orange DMC's analytics are not visible to us yet, so there are no before-and-after numbers to show.

If you run a travel business and want a site your team can edit, or a private space for your trade partners, tell us what you need.