Renewing a Japan-Travel Media Platform for Thai Visitors with a Headless CMS and Multilingual Support
Renewal of "Talon Japan," a Travel Information Media Platform
Challenge
As Talon Japan continued to deliver information to users in Thailand interested in traveling to Japan, the team was looking ahead to further growing its community. While the existing site, built on WordPress, functioned well as a day-to-day publishing platform, the team recognized that a more flexible technical foundation would be needed to move forward with multilingual expansion in English and Thai, as well as to add new AI-powered features going forward. They also wanted to rethink their SEO approach from the ground up, moving away from a reliance on plugins, so that articles could reach a wider readership. With this forward-looking awareness of the challenges ahead, Talon Japan decided to take on the website renewal project together with Monstarlab.
Our Approach
Monstarlab proposed an approach that made the most of the existing site's UI design and sitemap while keeping costs down, focusing the renewal on a major overhaul of the technical foundation. In place of WordPress, a headless CMS was adopted for the admin interface. By separating the frontend from the backend, the project achieved easier maintenance and operability, along with greater extensibility for future feature additions, while also eliminating security risks associated with plugins.
For multilingual support, the team implemented a URL structure to accommodate English and Thai, along with a design that allows content in multiple languages to be managed from a single admin interface. This makes it possible to add further languages in the future with minimal additional effort.
On the SEO side, structured data (JSON-LD) was added to each page, changing the site's structure so that article content can be conveyed accurately to search engines. This improved the crawlability of articles as landing pages, addressing a previous issue where many articles were difficult to surface in search results.
The project was carried out through a global team structure, with sales staff in Japan working alongside a project leader and engineering team in Thailand. This cross-border collaboration made it possible to develop the site with local business practices and language needs in mind.
Results
The renewed website has been fully released in both Thai and English versions. New member registration and "My Page" features were added, allowing users to save their favorite coupons and articles and revisit them anytime during their travels.
The migration to a headless CMS has also given the Talon Japan team a system for managing and updating articles and coupon information with greater flexibility and speed. In addition to making articles easier to surface in search results through the improved SEO structure, further SEO enhancement is planned going forward through category and tag organization in collaboration with the Talon Japan team.
Monstarlab will continue to support Talon Japan's ongoing growth from a technical standpoint.
