Starting with guides to Asia and later becoming the premier publisher of guides to the Americas, Moon was one of the first advocates of independent travel.
Published by Avalon Travel, Moon produces travel guides for the independent explorers, and is the premier publisher of guides covering the Americas. Expert authors are politically and culturally minded, producing compelling and comprehensive works with uniquely inspiring stories informing travel adventures near and abroad.
Avalon partnered with Five Paths to develop and implement a strategy and systems for publishing online, seeking to dramatically expand the availability of Moon Handbook content. Our challenges included importing thousands of pages from Moon Handbooks, automate its publication online, and to integrate this within Moon's editorial process to preserve a lean and efficient internal team. We developed a system to extract moon handbooks automatically from the editors' files, and transform it seamlessly to the site. We produced several tools to speed up the online editorial process, including advanced content search and replace tools, one-click tagging tools for cataloging content, complete navigation management systems, and wizards for producing content promotions. We developed integrations to existing company database systems and third party vendors to keep large amounts of handbook information current automatically, enabling thousands of pages to be updated without requiring editorial effort. Five Paths ran regular strategy and prototyping sessions to learn the best ways to catalog travel content, images, maps and blogs to present the most compelling online experience.
Avalon relies on Five Paths for continued support and guidance as the moon.com site grows since launching early 2009.
