Partner Portal: homepage, naming, and going global

Photos moved out of the sidebar card into a full-width wall

Four polaroids across the full width, placed above the voyages and below the trust bar — a visitor sees that this person has actually been there before seeing what they sell. Folder grouping and the “+N” lightbox are unchanged.

Also solved: It also closed a 400px gap that had sat under the left column since 18 August: the gap was caused by that very photo card sitting in the right column.

Partners choose their own banner

Any photo in the library can become the homepage banner. We store the photo, not a link to it — so changing storage domains needs no migration, and a photo that gets taken down falls back to the default cover instead of hanging on a page it should have left.

Two lines of copy that were overclaiming

“Share” became “Share their page” — the person clicking it is a visitor, not the advisor. And the photo wall no longer says the pictures were “taken on their voyages”: partners upload whatever they like, and we know neither where a photo was taken nor who took it. It now says what we do know — travel photos they've shared.

Cruise Centre renamed and reordered

Featured Voyages → Popular Voyages. Dates & Rates → Voyage Commission, and it moved to the top of the group as the default landing page. Assets → Cruise Media.

Why: The first thing a partner opens this group to see is commission, not a curated pool.

Five more labels

My Group Trips → Recruiting Now; My Picks → Homepage Picks — from “whose it is” to “what state it's in”. Photo Manager → Homepage Photos. The support inbox channel “Web” → “Homepage”. And in group management, “Remove from homepage” became “Cancel group”.

A picked voyage badge now opens its manager

Clicking an already-picked badge no longer un-picks it on the spot; it opens the matching manager. Cancelling lives there now, and the wording says so.

Why: Once a voyage is picked, the work is running it — pinning, writing the pitch, adding photos, watching sign-ups — and all of that lives in the manager. Mis-tapping and cancelling a group that is actively recruiting costs far more than one extra page load.

Ship order now follows the operator's own order

On the commission page, ships are grouped by supplier and ordered exactly as they are arranged in the back office. Before this, the order was whatever the database happened to return — with no tie-breaker at all, so the same data could come back in a different order on two consecutive loads.

The voyage picker got filters

Partners told us it was hard to find a voyage. It now filters by supplier, destination and departure window, and opens on a shortcut list of the voyages that partner has already picked — nine times out of ten, the plan is for one of those. Rows now show the ship and the number of nights, and dates follow the interface language.

Rebuilt, and now drag-to-reorder

Each photo is its own card, and the two actions under it — set as banner, delete from library — are real buttons now. One changes the public homepage and the other is irreversible; they used to look exactly like the caption text above them.

Why: The order you drag is the order visitors see — the portal and the public page share one ordering rule, not two.

Suggested tags rewritten for every kind of advisor

The 28 suggestions had been written for a polar photographer — polar photography, on-trip photo coaching, shot planning, photo editing reviews, album curation. An advisor selling river cruises in Europe, or family sailings in the US, opened that page and found nothing that described them. They are now organised by trip type and way of working, and photography is one option among many rather than the premise.

Tags no longer freeze in the language they were typed in

A Chinese-speaking advisor picked “Expedition Cruises” and we stored those Chinese characters — so an English-speaking visitor to that advisor's page saw a row of Chinese. Platform suggestions and destinations are now stored as stable references and rendered in the reader's language. Anything an advisor types themselves is stored and shown exactly as written.

Why: Service languages deliberately stay as written. When an advisor lists 日本語, they are telling you which language they will serve you in — that should read the same to everyone, not be translated into “Japanese”.

Destination suggestions in every language

In 22 of the 23 interface languages, the destination suggestions had been coming through in English — the translated names were in the database the whole time and simply never used.

Suggestions silently cut in half

The tag length limit had been set by how much fits in Chinese. Twenty Chinese characters is generous; twenty Latin characters does not hold an ordinary two-word phrase, and the server was trimming the rest away without a word. Twenty-nine translations were caught by a new length check before they ever shipped.

A destination that vanished from every language

The same length gate was measured against the English name while the translated name was what got displayed — so “Northern Europe & Scandinavia” was filtered out everywhere, including Chinese, where its name is nine characters long.

A silent empty result

One destination filter accepted only top-level regions; given anything else it returned nothing at all — indistinguishable, on screen, from “this destination has no voyages”.