Built so the client could keep building
A Croatian tour operator's site, designed and built from scratch in 2021 — a custom WordPress theme selling tours in three languages, plus the plugins his ideas actually needed, including a component builder that let him lay out new pages without us.
- Kind
- Web design and development
- Year
- 2021
- Service line
- Web apps & software
- For
- Explorer.hr, a Croatian tour operator
- Scope
- Design, custom theme and plugins, WPML multilingual, online sales, deployment
- Built with
- WordPress, PHP, WPML — theme and plugins written for this site
- Duration
- Three months, 2021
The brief
Explorer.hr sold guided tours around Croatia — regional trips through Lika, Gorski kotar, Istra and northern Dalmatia, alongside day trips and a sailing week. The client arrived with a website in mind rather than a brief: a great many ideas about how his tours should look and behave, and no technical frame to hang them on.
That is where most of the difficulty of this project sat, and it is worth saying plainly because it is the part clients underestimate. Getting from a long list of what someone wants to something coherent enough to draw, and from the drawing to something they can still operate after handover, is not the easy half of the work. DotDash took all of it: the design, the build, and the deployment to the client's hosting.
What we built
The theme was written from scratch rather than bought and bent into shape. A tour operator's site is largely one thing repeated — a tour, with a region, a duration, a gallery and a way to enquire about it — and a stock theme's idea of a page fights that arrangement at every turn.
Two custom plugins did the work a standard install could not. The first was a component builder, and its point was the opposite of freedom: it handed the client the sections that had already been designed, so he could assemble a new tour page or a new part of the home page himself without being able to pull the design apart. WordPress had shipped a block editor by 2021 — what it does not ship is a set of blocks that only look like your site.
The second gave tours their own regional tagging: Lika, Gorski kotar, Istra, northern Dalmatia. Region was how the operator sold his trips, so region had to be how people found them. WordPress categories assume a blog, and a tour does not belong to a topic. It belongs to a place.
Two things made that structure harder than a brochure site. It published in Croatian, English and Hungarian through WPML, and it took payment for tours rather than only collecting enquiries. The first pulled on everything else — a custom post type, custom tagging and a component builder all have to be translation-aware, or the second language becomes a copy that quietly drifts out of date. Deployment to the client's hosting was ours too: the job ran from the first conversation to a site that was live, selling, and his.
What it does now
The component builder existed so that adding a page was the client's job rather than ours, and that was the point of building editing tools rather than only building pages. A site handed over as a set of fixed layouts becomes a support contract; one handed over with the means to extend it becomes the client's.
Explorer.hr is no longer online: the client's business closed, and the site went with it. That is why this entry is written in the past tense throughout, and why no figure is quoted — nothing about the site's commercial performance was measured by us, and a number attached to a system that has since stopped would be worth less than saying so plainly. What remains checkable is what the work was: three months from first conversation to a site that was live and selling, a theme and two plugins written for one operator's way of working, and a client who could publish into them without us.
- WordPress
- PHP
- Custom plugins
- Multilingual
