Walkers Ways wanted a website that showcased the beauty of Scotland, enticing customers in with dramatic views that they would encounter along the walks.
Project Description
Walkers Ways are an active travel company based in Menstrie, Scotland. There are many long-distance walking paths in Scotland which showcase its extreme beauty, far from the crowds, immersed in deep glens, putting one foot in front of the other to reach your overnight accommodation.
Walkers Ways help customers reconnect with nature, sending them along these famous paths, the West Highland Way and the Rob Roy Way, to enjoy their beauty without having to carry their luggage on their back. With delightful overnight accommodation along the routes and baggage handlers picking up and dropping off their luggage every night, Walkers Ways are offering a premium service to those who want to experience the beauty of Scotland at their own pace.
The Brief
This type of slow travel, of disconnecting from the fast pace of everyday life is increasing in popularity and Walkers Ways wanted a website that showcased the beauty of Scotland, enticing customers in with dramatic views that they would encounter along the walks.
The main issue around booking this is conveying all of the information around these trips in an easy to understand, functional way that made it easy for potential customers to navigate. There are several different itineraries on each of the trips and helping customers to navigate the site without confusion was key to getting the brief right.
Also, highlighting their USP was important. This is not a place for information on how to walk the routes, with a tent and rucksack on your back, this is a premium service, with well-appointed accommodations and a personal baggage service throughout.
Deliverables
Web Design and Development – Walkers Ways needed a way to transform a website which was not delivering the sales they demanded. They wanted a more modern, fresh site that really showed off the raw beauty of their walking holidays. They also wanted more calls to action and an easier way for their customers to get in touch and get booked up.
Digital Marketing and SEO – Like most start-ups, Walkers Ways had an existing website build from an idea, built from passion and enthusiasm, but not built with technical know-how on the back end. We crawled the most appropriate keywords and created content structured around them to ensure a solid foundation in Google Search for the brand.
Secure Managed Web Hosting – To ensure the new site ran as quickly as possible and that their information and their customer’s information was secure, Walkers Ways took up our hosting product. With our daily backups and sterling customer service, Walkers Ways never need to worry about losing business from their site going down.
Our Solution
Before we start any project, we know how important it is to delve deep into the customers business, to get a feel for their demographic, their brand promise, look and feel. We wanted to really understand their customer base, as well as the products that they were selling and from here we were able to sketch out some basic designs for the website.
With two products dominating the site, we would be able to use relatively few page numbers, however, the amount of information required on each of the pages meant that the pages would have to be creatively designed to allow the information to flow properly and the calls to action appear in the correct locations.
We needed to convey the information about the trip, combined with Walkers Ways USP in an enticing text block, before delving into more details about the actual offering. We developed a longer text block, interspersed with imagery to go in-depth on the tour details, both to let the customer know more and to help boost the SEO of the page in Google.
With lists of the various trip lengths at the bottom of the page, along with strong calls to action on each, we then linked a hidden booking page, so that each trip was easily bookable. We also added a simple dynamic order form to make sure customers could connect and book up as easily as possible.
We went back and forth with Walkers Ways with various imagery to see what captured their imagination, and what fitted perfectly with their ideal brand. With seasonal conditions for outdoor photography not at their best, we opted for strong stock imagery that really captured the beauty of the routes, along with as many photos of hikers as we could get to ensure potential customers got the idea that this could be them in the future.
We kept the branding consistent throughout, with the idea of the bootprint generating, both the rugged, outdoorsy font and the dynamic splash logo. Instead of the traditional straight lines to denote the footer of the page, we went with a silhouette of the hills just to give that perfect brand feel.
A simple, easy to navigate, beautiful looking site with straightforward booking capabilities, Walkers Ways are using this as a platform to grow their business and their product range.
To let Ossian Media analyse your business needs or existing site and see how we can make your site work for you, get in touch today and we can start discussing your digital needs.
