Enabling life changing volunteering trips

Background

African Adventures is a unique travel company based on the South Coast. They partner with 29 schools in developing areas of Ghana, Kenya and Zanzibar and organise life-changing volunteering trips for groups like schools, charities, Scouts and corporate teams.

The Challenge

African Adventures approached us after receiving a strong recommendation from a trusted advisor. Their current site had reached end-of-life, with support expiring for their commercial WordPress theme. Since the launch of their previous site, the company had grown and they wanted a new “levelled up” site to better reflect their current offering.

The Results

The new website has had a dramatic impact on all aspects of the business. Of particular note are:

• 47% increase in leads. The optimised Trip Planner workflow has positively impacted sales leads.
• 39% more engagement. Interactions are up across the site.
• 78% reduction in admin time. Thanks to the new Content Management System, creating and editing new trip pages is now significantly quicker allowing African Adventures to deliver more quickly at a lower cost.

Discovery & Design

We initially worked with the African Adventures team on a co-design Discovery phase. This enabled us to better understand the shortcomings of their existing site and their needs for the future.

Collaboratively we created the key user personas for the site, identifying the need for a sub-section dedicated to their charitable foundation. With this better understanding, we were able to build a site map, wireframe out the key landing pages and document the key user journeys and interactions.

The Discovery phase enabled us to create a shared understanding of the best way forward for the site and to build a strategic approach to its delivery.

Visual Identity Refresh

In tandem with the planning activities during the Discovery phase we also helped African Adventures refine their visual identity. We produced an updated colour palette, designed improved typography and made refinements to their logo to better reflect their established and fun brand positioning.

To support the website design we created a range of decorative assets that could also be used across other digital marketing channels. These included a suite of icons and vibrant repeating pattern.

Key requirements

• Improve previous issues with security – page not loading for every user
• Ability to showcase previous successful trips through case studies
• Meet the needs of a variety of client personas all requiring the correct information, pricing of a trip, and a sense of credibility
• Blogs to rank well for SEO

Information Architecture

• Optimise content structure for potential customers
• Engaging mega menu with CTA

Bespoke trip planner workflow

A key requirement for the site was an interactive trip planner that allowed group leaders to plan the itinerary of a trip. The tool needed to easily walk someone through the multiple decisions required to plan a trip, simply presenting available options at each stage. African Adventures wanted to make booking a trip with them as simple as a city trip to Europe.

We designed and implemented a bespoke trip planner interface that presented visitors with a multi step process for planning their ideal trip. At each stage all options are clearly presented and pricing updates dynamically to indicate the cost implications of each decision made.

At the end of the journey a full itinerary is presented and can optionally be emailed as a PDF. Providing an offline friendly PDF enables trip planners to produce scenarios that they can then present to a broader organisational panel to help get buy-in for a trip.

The trip planner was designed to make customers’ lives easier but also helps African Adventures capture high quality leads in a structured way.

African Adventures required a website that they could easily and quickly update. Updates needed to be swift, and the ability to utilise a variety of layouts was crucial, all while maintaining a cohesive brand identity.

We addressed this by implementing a custom page builder within their existing WordPress CMS (Content Management System). This builder provides a library of reusable content blocks that can be easily integrated anywhere on the site. This empowers non-technical editors to add and modify pages using any combination of these pre-built components.

The custom page builder not only unlocks significant editorial control but also ensures brand consistency across the entire website. This minimises the risk of accidental design inconsistencies, keeping the overall user experience seamless.

Reliable, performant, green hosting

A best-in-class new website needs reliable hosting. It needs a repeatable, automatable deploy process, secure and maintained infrastructure and performant load times.

Kinsta provides a WordPress optimised hosting platform that is feature-rich, cost-effective and can also be configured to work with a Modern WordPress setup. Their support team is highly knowledgeable on WordPress and are amongst the most responsive we’ve dealt with. They provide regular backups, handle the SSL certificate for you, provide advanced DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection and multiple environments out of the box.

Using the Content Delivery Network (CDN) and caching built into Kinsta’s service we were also able to speed up the delivery of image assets to visitors across the globe.

Running on Google’s Cloud Platform also means that Kinsta is running on 100% green energy.