Project Overview
Let’s talk about Phillip Island. A hop and a skip south of Melbourne, Phillip Island is a haven for wildlife enthusiasts, motorheads (hello Grand Prix!) and holidaymakers alike. With pristine coastline and a healthy penguin population, it’s also an environmental sanctuary beloved by locals.
Destination Phillip Island (DPI) are responsible for all tourism promotion in the Phillip Island region. They work with local operators, Visit Victoria and neighbouring RTB’s to drive awareness and push visitation.
To be more effective, DPI needed a new destination marketing site. Their old ‘Visit Phillip Island’ website was outdated, difficult to update and no longer serving the needs of visitors. They wanted their new site to be striking and contemporary, packed with need-to-know content for visitors and functional across all devices, from mobile to desktop. Not to mention cost effective.
ROAM was the perfect fit for this project. On Roam, tourism bodies can actually create stunning destination marketing websites and save time using the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse (ATDW), Zomato and Instagram integrations while still allowing for a completely bespoke design - meaning we could create an experience that was unique to Phillip Island and captured the island’s natural beauty and attractions.
When creating the new site, we prioritised custom pages, operator listings and blogs for engaging user experience, social feeds and sharing functions, and upgraded search capability and SEO optimisation for premium visibility.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Charlotte Dupuy, Mack Nevill, Tim Anderson, Matt Cordell, Rom Palmas, Chris Ventura
Project Brief
The brief was as such: create a custom new tourism site that would increase awareness of Phillip Islands extraordinary experiences, engage and enhance the online visitor experience, drive more bookings and beautifully convey the Phillip Island regional brand messaging.
Not only that, but we were also briefed to better the site’s functions. Such as, improving measurement mechanisms, providing seamless booking opportunities to accommodation and attractions; including different language offerings for international tourism markets and integrating social media channels.
In a nutshell, this new site was to be super functional but also put visitor experience at the top of the list. This was to be a website that was easy to navigate, responsive on devices and beautifully designed.
Project Need
After initial meetings and workshops with the DPI team, we quickly outlined the project’s key needs. Considering how outdated and difficult to navigate their old website was, it was exceptionally important that this new site was bespoke and carefully designed. It needed to be easy to use and fully responsive across mobile, tablet and desktop.
Besides this, the Roam platform provides powerful search and filtering tools, social feed integration and a storytelling toolset. The inclusion of different layouts was also necessary to cater to different operator listings, general content and blogs.
At the end of the day, DPI needed this site to be super user friendly in order to drive more site conversions.
User Experience
Can we ever talk too much about user experience? We don’t think so. Here at Evolution 7, providing exceptional user experience is our bread and butter. And it’s exactly why DPI came to us.
For their site, we prioritised mobile. Despite the site being full responsive across all devices, we knew that for their key target demographics a first-class mobile experience was going to be a game changer. Lightning fast search across the entire operator directory also provides an enhanced user experience and makes it easier for visitors to find & book operators.
We also designed everything in line with DPI brand guidelines, to keep it recognisable to existing users. We wanted to promote the playful nature of the region in addition to the better known natural attractions (and the ubiquitous fairy penguins!) so we embraced those themes in our approach.
When on the site, there is also a clear flow for users to follow and engage with the content, making it easy to discover everything there is to do and see around Phillip Island.
Project Marketing
The first step in the project was understanding all existing website analytics and other data relevant to user behaviours. This gave us a deeper understanding of user needs and how we could support the user journey with user-focused design, easily navigable site architecture and a call-to-action placement strategy.
Once the development of the website kicked off, our strategists ensured that the website was search engine optimised, including technical and on-page SEO measures as poor SEO performance of the websites previous iteration was a serious concern.
We set up and configured Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager, all of which allows for better digital marketing reporting and ultimately improved content opportunities.
Project Privacy
Standard privacy procedure was followed in accordance with best practice on all contact forms and other areas of the website where personally identifiable data was collected. In addition, we ensure that no personal information is passed through Google Analytics (eg. email addresses). Regular penetration testing is conducted to ensure the site and server are secure. The website, hosting and infrastructure pass this testing with no significant issues identified.
Tags
Digital - Travel
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