Discover the World: a comprehensive website full of discovery

How to upgrade a large, existing website for one of the UK’s leading Tour Operators; to improve performance, seamlessly integrating it with their current CRM whilst at the same time laying technical foundations for future roll-outs?

Insight:

As always, we began with customer research, which showed that the current online experience wasn’t as good as it could be. Site visitors were leaving the site when they shouldn’t, it wasn’t performing as quickly as it needed to, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to navigate; consequently the site wasn’t delivering anything close to the optimum. We needed to re-think the site from start to finish, ensuring a seamless customer journey that really delivered on the brand promise people expected from Discover the World, demonstrating their specialist knowledge and experience.

visit the site

The Wild Dog development team are first class and combine a great skills set of back and front-end developers that complement each other perfectly. They’ve gone beyond the scope of our brief and solutions to various issues (some we didn’t even know we had!), including UX and conversion rate optimisation. We know all of the team personally and you won’t find a friendlier, more professional team I’m sure.

Renée Shorter
Marketing Manager
Discover the World

Our approach:

Based on site analytics and customer research, developing an improved information architecture (IA) was a crucial first step in this project. We identified personas for their core user groups and created improved journeys for them through the website. The new IA made it much easier for users to explore their range of destinations and tours available. Our initial phase was to identify what performance and user improvements we could make on the existing site; whilst concurrently focussing on the main re-design and rebuild of the front and back-end.

We had worked closely with Discover the World for many years on their print collateral, so fortunately we were completely up to speed on their brand and had excellent product knowledge from the start. This enabled us to rapidly develop designs that faithfully reflected the heritage and extraordinary nature of the company's offering; whilst our analysis through the IA phase meant that our new front-end designs really brought the site to life, showcasing the destinations to their fullest and creating a slick, effective site that is not only easy to use, but also highly rewarding.

Greatly improving the search functionality was also a major part of the project. We made the search functionality fully accessible, so it worked even when javascript was turned off, and greatly improved meta-titles, search parameters and filters to improve SEO performance. Based on a Joomla back-end CMS, we successfully integrated with existing third-party CRM and other services, ensuring that the website has a solid frame-work for future planned expansion as Discover the World grow rapidly, developing new and exciting travel options to new areas across the globe.