Paloma Tours
Bilingual website for a destination management company
A bilingual website for a Romanian destination management company that has run business events since 1997: MICE, DMC, congresses and team training across Romania and Bulgaria, with a quote request flow built in.
The Challenge
Paloma Tours had almost thirty years of events behind it and a website that said none of that. The new site had to convince two very different readers at once: a corporate buyer comparing DMCs for a large incentive trip, and a congress secretariat that cares about registration desks and timing. It also had to work in English and Spanish, load fast on shared hosting, and let the Paloma team publish stories and update services without calling a developer.
How I Built It
I designed and built the site on WordPress with a custom Tailwind theme, compiled locally instead of the browser-side Play CDN. Merriweather and Archivo are self-hosted, so the fonts survive LiteSpeed optimisation and no visitor request goes to Google Fonts. The homepage is a sequence of ACF-driven sections, from a full-screen video hero to a booking-process grid, a horizontal services carousel and a stories feed, animated with GSAP and ScrollTrigger.
Bilingual by design
English and Spanish run through Polylang. Template copy goes through a small translation dictionary keyed on the English string, so a missing entry falls back to English instead of breaking a page.
Enquiry flow
A Quick Quote modal and the contact form post to a custom handler that stores every enquiry in WordPress and emails the team over SMTP, with a honeypot instead of a captcha.
Fast on shared hosting
LiteSpeed caching tuned around the animation scripts, self-hosted GSAP, fonts and vendor libraries, and versioned assets so returning visitors always get the current build.
Results That Matter
Paloma now has a site that reads like the company it describes: 700+ events a year, offices in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca and Sofia, and a clear path from any service page to a quote request. The team edits every homepage section, publishes stories and manages both languages from wp-admin.
What I Delivered
- Custom Tailwind (TailPress) WordPress theme with a compiled build
- English and Spanish via Polylang, with a string dictionary that falls back to English
- ACF-driven homepage: video hero, stats, booking process, services carousel, projects, testimonials, stories, FAQ
- Service pages for MICE, DMC, PCO and Training, plus Sustainability and News
- Quick Quote modal and contact form with a custom handler and SMTP delivery
- GSAP and ScrollTrigger animations with a page-transition curtain
- Self-hosted fonts and vendor scripts, LiteSpeed cache tuning
