Completed Drupal site or project URL:
STOP PRESS! We are proud to announce that Visit Cornwall has been recognised in the following awards:
Winner of the Best UK Visitor Guide Website in the British Travel Awards 2012
Runner up in the Leisure & Culture sector of the 2012 British Interactive Media Association Awards.
Winner of Travelmole Best Tourist Board Site 2012 (click the Winners tab).
Cornwall is the jewel in the crown of the British tourist industry, thanks to its rugged landscape and beautiful sunny beaches. In excess of five million visitors can’t be wrong!
Visit Cornwall is the face of tourism in the county of Cornwall. Managed by the Cornwall Development Company, a company controlled by Cornwall Council, its purpose is to build upon its previous successes in promoting Cornwall as the destination of choice.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Drupal’s capacity to pull together and present complex inter-related content, backed by an overwhelming source of community functionality and the ability to scale were key factors in our choice of CMS.
These relationships were exposed through Drupal’s integration with Apache Solr, which was the ideal way to manage such a vast collection of data, and to filter through to what interests people most.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
What Cornwall needed was an open-standards-powered website which could scale to meet the needs of the region and a partner with the capability and vision to produce a site worthy of the Celtic nation of Kernow.
The trouble was that the Visit Cornwall website struggled to keep up with the popularity of the place. Not only was it a bit long in the tooth on the surface, but 'behind the scenes' the technology that supported the site no longer met the growing needs of the Cornwall Development Company. It was built on a previously government-mandated proprietary system and was horrifically complex, and promoted a vendor lock-in mentality.
Step in, Nameless, with our CMS platform of choice for enterprise-level requirements, Drupal.
Primarily, the main focus of the new website was to encompass data on the existing system (which came with a licence fee) and large quantities of data from other sources, and to combine and present this content in an engaging format to prospective visitors and those already in Cornwall.
The existing website had a fairly plain approach to visitors: choose your accommodation, choose your activities based upon category and move on. It felt utilitarian and lacked a unique selling point. It needed a fresh approach, in order to better promote the uniqueness and vitality of the county.
The new website also had to cater to the needs of the many suppliers associated with Visit Cornwall, the many hotels, B&Bs, tourist attractions, and beaches. Information needed to be accurate, up-to-date and presented in a pleasing manner which would also promote local service providers to increase visitors’ use of their facilities.
The approach
If you’re designing a site for 1.5 million digital visitors and a wide variety of service providers it makes sense to prepare and research your audience.
Thankfully the Cornwall Development Company had a wealth of research data, so our task was made easier than it might have been. That said, we augmented that knowledge with some guerrilla research with audience groups, using the KJ Method, which is a fantastic tool for capturing opinion evenly across large groups.
We took a fairly agile approach to ensure both the functionality and design were considered with respect to each other, and not in isolation. Our project management team, lead designer and lead developer where in regular contact with Visit Cornwall’s project team. This allowed us to find solutions to limitations and deal with other issues as and when they presented themselves.
Our sketchboarding process helped form the idea of a visitor as the central concept of the website: everything is about you. Whether you're here with your family, or your border collie, the website adapts itself around such key aspects in order to favor accommodation and activities suited to you. It also helps target featured content shown throughout the site.
We prototyped a few different options before coming up with a suitable method of introducing these filters. We then went about a lengthy prototyping and design process to capture the right feel for both viewing the various lists and facets, and giving the right amount of visual prominence to each.
Outcome
Our strategy for the site was to show the breadth of content and visual impact that Cornwall has to offer whilst making it easy to find points of interest for specific visitors. To strike this balance we created a Customise Your Visit tool using faceted search, powered by Apache Solr and OpenLayers dynamic mapping, to help illustrate trip options in a meaningful way.
Apache Solr is used to drive almost all content throughout the site. It underpins the Customise Your Visit tool, and works with the myriad facets attached to product attributes such as accessibility, pricing, and types of event (making very heavy use of the Facet API module).
Throughout the site we make extensive, but measured, use of external services and social features. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook commenting and social sharing through AddThis help Cornwall’s community of website visitors find and communicate with each other. This further provides Visit Cornwall’s community team the opportunity to engage with a very broad audience via a cross-media platform.
The unique features offered by VisitCornwall.com are already winning favor among users as the website has been shortlisted for the British Travel Awards 2012 'Best UK Visitor Guide Website'.
Visit Cornwall staff have a vast array of categorisation and SEO tools available to them, all brought together in a clean and well-presented admin interface. The sheer range of categories in which a product can appear requires special attention. Tree widgets were introduced in order to keep them usable as they were adjusted following the initial data imports.
Google Analytics is key to Visit Cornwall’s understanding of what works on the website, and what doesn’t. A vast array of events and goals are tracked in order to measure the effectiveness and popularity of content and to show its value to advertisers.
Some measures of growth since Visit Cornwall launched in February 2012:
Around 10% of the more than 1000 accommodation providers listed on the website tell us Visit Cornwall has become top referrer of traffic to their own websites.
Visit Cornwall has more than doubled the number of food and drink businesses on the website (from 20 to over 40). Businesses cite the improved user experience is enabling customer to more easily locate food and drink outlets.
The Visit Cornwall Facebook group has seen an increase of over 2,000 followers.
Traffic referrals to the website from Facebook has increased by 100%.
Visit Cornwall videos hosted on YouTube have clocked over 200,000 views since the website launched.
Team members:
Project team:
Drupal Developer having 9+ year experience, implementation and having strong knowledge of technical specifications, workflow development. Ability to perform effectively and efficiently in team and individually. Always enthusiastic and interseted to study new technologies
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