Mitteldeutsche Flughafen AG (MDF AG) has united the three subsidiaries Flughafen Leipzig/Halle GmbH, Flughafen Dresden GmbH and the ground handling service provider PortGround GmbH since 2000. The company is publicly owned, with the Free State of Saxony, the State of Saxony-Anhalt and the cities of Leipzig, Dresden and Halle/Saale being among the shareholders of MDF AG.
After a long period of operation, the websites of our locations were in need of a significant overhaul. They also needed to be united under one roof. In Netresearch, we had a reliable partner for this project who provided us with excellent support throughout the entire implementation process and realised this challenging project for us on time and to our satisfaction.
Inga Backhaus
Head of Marketing/Vice President Marketing
Central German Airports AG
The subsidiaries still had their own websites until June 2020. Before the project began, there was one website each for the online offerings of Mitteldeutsche Flughafen AG, Dresden Airport, Leipzig/Halle Airport and PortGround. Now a standardised Internet presence was desired for all four companies, which publicly conveys the unity and emphasises the synergy effects resulting from the merger of the locations. This will also standardise the management of the web infrastructure. The concept for this was developed together with Oberüber Karger Kommunikationsagentur GmbH.
Thanks to the use of TYPO3 and the chosen infrastructure, the new website of Mitteldeutsche Flughafen AG is very flexible and the system is optimally prepared for later adaptations and extensions. Current and future services can be integrated quickly and easily. Both the flight data and the airline logos of the daily flight schedule and the seasonal flight schedule, for example, are displayed via interfaces, thus ensuring that visitors to the new mdf-ag.com website always have up-to-date data.
The new standardised site was implemented with a cloud-capable TYPO3 installation. The infrastructure was fully provisioned with Terraform to fulfil the "Everything as Code" concept. We also rely on CI/CD pipelines for Mitteldeutsche Flughafen AG. This approach enables us to realise automated testing before the deployments and to carry out the deployments themselves as required at any time.
During development, we consistently took care to avoid "hard coding" so that our customer also has the greatest possible freedom for system configuration in the future. In addition to the technical aspects, we also placed a special focus on the modern requirements for UX/UI design, mobile optimisation and data protection compliance in order to create an optimal and secure user experience for visitors to the website.
Mitteldeutsche Flughafen AG has been given a new website that combines online communication for the company and gradually for all subsidiaries - realised using TYPO3 version 9. Numerous functions have been designed so that information from both locations can be researched in order to bundle the location advantages of both airports and present both options to the user. For example, the newly developed flight search function, which allows users to search for flights for the coming year, allows them to choose between the departure or arrival airports of Dresden, Leipzig/Halle or both. The options and the interactive map make the flight search particularly convenient for users.
In addition to the production system, the customer received an identical but separate editorial system for managing and maintaining the content. With the help of the nr_sync extension developed by Netresearch and made freely available to the TYPO3 community in line with the open source concept, editors are able to transfer edited and created content from the editorial system to the production system at any time. By means of an incremental sync, the resource requirements of the process can be reduced to a minimum. The functionally enhanced TYPO3 also enables back-end users without technical expertise to put new content live themselves.
The new website and online marketing activities are already showing initial success. For example, the time spent on the website increased by 40% after the relaunch, the number of contact enquiries via the website rose by 150% thanks to funnel optimisation and the number of downloads increased by 75%. In addition, Central German Airports generated 7 x more clicks from Facebook to the website within just 3 months.
