Objective: To design and build a modern user-friendly destination marketing website for Visit Bath which strikes a balance between inspiration and information, while providing a platform to book accommodation. The new site had to be responsive, easy to maintain and fully embrace the new brand identity.
Visit Bath is one of the most successful UK destination websites, which provide an accommodation booking service. However the system was not based on live availability, was clunky and out of date, and failed to provide a good user experience. In the face of competition from the large commercial OTAs, we needed to make it easier to book accommodation online. We also needed to ensure the site was completely responsive across all devices because 59% of Visit Bath’s traffic was from mobile/tablet.
We carried out an extensive discovery process to fully understand the client’s requirements, but the real learning took place during user experience testing with the Visit Bath members and potential consumers. With several key assumptions overturned, for both the client and the design team, and a whole raft of insight into website user behaviour, the functional specification was substantially re-written.
We included a separate industry-facing section of the Visit Bath site with a user specific menu and landing page, and a member log in allowing them to add and update their own listings.
TripAdvisor’s Affiliate Program was chosen as a cost effective, revenue-generating booking solution and each member’s ratings and reviews are now pulled in to their business listing.
From start to finish, the Co-Foundry team just ‘got it’ and were completely tuned in to our goals, visions and what we could do to achieve them. They offered solutions to the many problems we faced and often looked at things in a new way that we hadn’t considered when writing our initial brief. They were always professional and very knowledgeable, but also great fun to work with.
—Gemma Hayter, Digital Marketing Manager, Visit Bath
