A stormin’ solution for national railcard website

23 March 2020

A website designed and developed by Quiet Storm to support the Government’s new 16-17 Saver Railcard hit the headlines earlier this year.

We were given a six-week lead time to develop the front-end of the new site for the national Rail Delivery Group.

The site, www.16-17saver.co.uk, was launched to a flurry of national media headlines by then Rail Minister, Chris Heaton-Harris. The 16-17 Saver Railcard is a new product gives more than 1.2 million 16- and 17-year olds access to half-price rail fares in a bid to boost education opportunities and help communities and businesses by making travel cheaper for young people.

It enables users to save an estimated £186 on rail fares each year, on average.
 

A seamless integration

Quiet Storm has worked with the Rail Delivery Group for several years, designing and developing a suite of websites which encourage rail travel and support the sales of several different types of rail cards to travellers across the UK.

We were commissioned to create the front end of the new 16-17 Saver site and ensure its seamless integration with the transactional ecommerce functionality of the site, which was provided by another supplier. We also had to guarantee the site’s server uptime to ensure it could cope with the volume of traffic that would visit at launch. Because we had already delivered several similar websites, we were able to turn this one around within the tight lead time by taking the existing format and site structure we had done for other sites and applying the relevant branding, design and content to the new one.

Our team then worked through the night to ensure the site was up and running with no problems at just after midnight on the day of the launch, which was featured in several national newspapers and breakfast television broadcasts.

Cath Lyver, head of marketing at the Rail Delivery Group, said:

“The launch of the 16-17 Saver demonstrates the rail industry’s commitment to providing the best value fares for all customers. The launch announcement was made to several major national media outlets, so it was absolutely crucial that the website was up and running with no issues, prior to the announcement being made.

“We have worked with Quiet Storm for several years on various projects and the team went over and above to ensure the website launch went smoothly and it could cope with the huge amount of traffic that the publicity generated.”

Quiet Storm Managing Director Steve Megson said:

“We’re proud to be a key partner of the Rail Delivery Group and have provided several digital solutions over the years to help it better promote rail travel to travellers across the UK. This project was all about providing a seamless customer journey to website visitors and ensuring that the website could cope with the sheer amount of traffic that we knew would be sent its way as the new 16-17 Saver Railcard was launched.

“We’ve just migrated all our web hosting provision over to Amazon Web Services, so were not only able to turn this project around within six weeks, but also guarantee it wouldn’t go down due to heavy traffic.”

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