Building a tourism website using Word Press and the Johku portal

The purpose of this bachelor’s thesis project was to create a tourism website for marketing and sales. The thesis was commissioned by Helsinki West which had been operating its business mostly manually before deciding to move forward to do business in an online environment. The business name as well as domain for this website project is “VisitHappyFinland.fi”. This thesis project consisted of a planning phase in which a team of students worked on various platforms to find out the best direction for website and a development phase which executed the agreed path of development. Based on the findings of the planning phase, the website will be using WordPress as the main frameworks with the help of the Johku portal as an E-commerce solution. These two platforms will be merged at the end of the development process to create a unified and complete website. The result of this thesis project was a functional WordPress website with the Johku portal embedded. The customer can use this website to find information about the business, browsing product catalogs, product previews and making purchases via the Johku portal. The client can use the website as a marketing tool, for e-commerce purposes and for managing sales and products stock. However, the final product delivered shows many drawbacks in adaptability when merging two different platforms such as interrupting the customer’s journey by redirecting them to a different site. Also, the design of the plugins does not match with WordPress. This is because at the time of the project, the Johku embedded system was still a prototype, which needed more improvement to work properly. With the findings and insights from this thesis project, the client can decide to change the direction of their project to develop website solely with the Johku portal