Tripsite
Tripsite engaged us to bring their website up to date and help take their tour business to the next level.
The Tripsite.com redesign was a really fun collaboration between Nifty, Ryan Cramer (lead developer of ProcessWire), and the team at Tripsite. We received valuable input from right across the team - marketing, tour specialists and management were all included to make this project a success.
The Design Process
The process started with looking at what worked well on the current site, what Tripsite's competitors did well, and brainstorming about new ideas and streamlined functionality. This led to producing mockups for each major area on the site which evolved into a final, cohesive design.
One of the strongest aspects of the Tripsite tour portfolio is the extensive high-quality imagery. We switched the search listing layout seen when browsing tour collections or viewing search results from a simple list to larger "cards" in 2 columns in order to better showcase the main image for each tour, whilst presenting the summary information clearly for each tour.
Tour page presentation
Extra care went into the individual tour page presentation.
Over the past 10 years, the amount of information for each tour had grown to the point that some sections had become too long to easily digest, so we set about breaking this up into more manageable chunks, using a simple navigation interface to switch between logical "tabs" of information.
With Tripsite's exceptional photo library we all wanted to make the photos a focus whilst not diminishing the importance of the tour information. We presented some of the overview details for tours next to a "hero" image in the header and then showed a brief introduction and highlights before showing more photos in a slider beneath this. Each photo can be clicked on to launch a larger slideshow to browse all of the photos along with their captions.
New review layout
Another strength of Tripsite is their huge number of positive reviews, cultivated from thousands of customers over the years. We worked on a new layout, presenting them in a way that's easier for customers to read through and making use of the new, wider layout whilst still easily allowing Tripsite staff to reply to any comments.
Custom weather module
A feature that was especially fun to work on was the custom weather module we created to display average temperature and rainfall data for each tour location. Prior to this module, tours linked to a third-party weather website which took the customer away from Tripsite and resulted in a disjointed experience.
The new module allows the tour specialists to automatically pull in weather averages onto the tour pages directly, resulting in a seamless experience for customers. To use it, the tour operators simply type in a city name and the module does the rest in seconds, generating the data from an external dataset, averaging measurements from daily records from the past 4 years to generate the tables.
We added custom background colours to the temperature table depending on the temperature for that month, and filled a percentage of the rainfall table in blue that related to the amount of rainfall for that month to make this normally generic data more visually appealing.
A few words from the client...
Jan van den Hengel, Chief Operating Officer at Tripsite had this to say about working with us:
"Many thanks to Pete and Nifty for bringing a detailed and fresh perspective to the largest website upgrade we’ve done in 10 years!"
We look forward to working alongside the team at Tripsite more as we develop and expand the website further to cater for more tour types over the coming months.