AZ Martinique is a website covering many aspects of Martinique. Originally, created to introduce the island to the world, it has evolved into a comprehensive resource on all things Martinique. Beyond its beaches, the site highlights the island’s rich culture, traditions, languages, and people — essential for any visitor seeking a deeper understanding.
Project
AZ Martinique was originally built in May 2012 using Drupal 7. However, over successive migrations, the site retained outdated MySQL tables, making its overall structure obsolete. A complete rebuild became necessary — with a focus on cleaning up the database, archiving outdated content, and updating inaccurate information.
How did I tackle the task?
First, I set up a clean Drupal 11 environment locally and rebuilt all the nodes to simplify the taxonomy and content types. The previous structure included many redundant content types that could be grouped to streamline the architecture.
Once the new structure was in place, I began migrating the existing content into the database. This involved careful work in PHPMyAdmin and MySQL to populate the new fields. The process required precision and took about three months to complete, covering over 3,000 nodes.
With the site functioning properly, I moved on to updating the content to ensure accuracy and relevance. I manually added images — a deliberate choice, as the previous ones were high-resolution and unnecessarily heavy.
Next, I designed a new layout inspired by the site’s most popular articles and overall user engagement. I kept the existing menu and submenu structure, as it was well-suited to the content and helped maintain familiarity for returning visitors.
I launched the redesigned site before all nodes were fully updated, prioritizing a stable, up-to-date version over a buggy legacy one.
I also refined the SEO strategy to better align with various types of indexing — from traditional search engines to large language models (LLMs).
Content updates, QA of the pages (broken links, SEO improvement) continue regularly, including regular updates to the homepage hero section to reflect current events and seasonal relevance.