Initial situation
Anyone who works in the Bernese Alps, as we do, sees paragliders flying around from the mountain peaks and high meadows every day. The paragliding school in Spiez – a.k.a. Flugbasis – supports pilots and guests from all over the world. With an increasing number of enquiries, a lot of time was being lost to administrative processes that could be automated. The previous content management system TYPO3 was too bulky for the customer, which is why a more flexible open source solution was sought.
Goals and vision
Every team can benefit from efficient administration tools, for example by simplifying interaction with customers and club members. In addition to general information about the school and the club, the website should be made more attractive with a members’ area and registration forms so that visitors can manage their interest and needs directly.
The project
In addition to comprehensive design work and the development of a customised WordPress Theme and several side-along plugins, we developed a member area with various functions. This part of the project includes several processes: from an automated registration process when reserving a course place and a one-click registration tool for members to a synchronisation tool for connection to an external CRM.
Modernising the design (2025)
The client was very happy with the original bespoke design I created in 2019 and signed off on the version I initially built using a combination of PHP templates and custom WordPress blocks. However, times change, and ideas about usability and legibility evolve. In 2025, a colleague of the business owner with an interest in design reviewed the website and provided a number of requirements for design changes. This created an opportunity to modernise the website and improve its navigation while retaining all the existing content and functionality.
Rebuilding the website for Full Site Editing (2026)
A year later, and seven years after building the original website, we decided that it was time to move the entire website’s structure away from the hand-coded PHP and Twig templates from the original version, which I had combined with editorial content control through the WordPress Block Editor.
This change brings several benefits, including improved performance, greater flexibility for the client when editing content and page layouts, and less reliance on constrictive and outmoded templating procedures. The new version of the website went online recently, and it was a great testament to both the concept and my collaboration with the client over the years that we were able to replicate the original site completely, rebuilding it with modern full-site editing technology while keeping its look and feel exactly the same.
Thanks to these technological advances and the implementation of the most modern approaches supported by WordPress—including editorial control over page and content layouts at different screen sizes, which arrived in version 7.1 of WordPress—new content sections and features will be much less time-consuming to implement. This means that when the client wants to add new functionality for his users, we can do so in a much more cost-effective way than before. Using the latest version of WordPress and its built-in technologies also makes maintaining the site much easier, and ensures its long-term viability.
