31-05-2012

Macs Adventure specialise in self-guided cycling and walking holidays in the UK and Europe. They firmly believe that the very best way to experience the landscape, history, food and culture of Europe is under one’s own steam.

Their expert team of destination and adventure specialists are mad about active cycling and walking holidays. They understand what makes for an unforgettable holiday; great trails, breathtaking scenery, hand-picked accommodation and a warm welcome all backed up by outstanding customer service. All of which sees thousands choose them each year to organise their cycling, multi-activity or walking holidays.

At Dojo Design Studio’s inception, we were thrilled to have Macs Adventure choose us to breathe new life into their online tour company. Four years later they have gone from strength to strength, blossoming into one of the UK’s premier adventure tour providers.

As a purely web-based business, we are delighted to have played a substantial part in their continued growth and success. Two months ago, they got in touch, looking to build upon that success and take it even further using our skill and expertise in all things web. Four years is a long lifespan in the realm of the web; design, functionality, methodology, software and hardware are constantly improving at a hyper-speed. It is a wise business leader who is aware of this, and who takes full advantage of the benefits these technological advancements can bring to their business. We always knew the CEO was a wise man, and were happy to get the call from Macs Adventure, allowing us to bestow all these new gifts onto their site.

User experience was a big focus for this redesign and rebuild, both for Macs Adventure customers and for their staff. For the customers we built a whole new navigation system, with smoothly animated drop down menus to reveal the entirety of the website’s hierarchy, each section being instantly accessible. We combined this with auto-generated breadcrumbing capabilities so that customers can easily trace their path throughout the site.

We built a new Holiday Finder Form, a powerful search tool that drills down to the customer’s desired holiday, based on either destination, activity or grade, or any combination of these. If no results are found, suggestions are given. From every page this serves up just what the customer is looking for at the click of a button.

We also incorporated advanced slideshow functionality, which has optional captions, smooth fade transitions, and an optional quick click-through image cycle. Automatically generated, and with every image said to be worth a thousand words, that’s 6000 instant words of a compelling and beautiful sales pitch right there on every tour’s page.

We built a mini media player side panel, randomly pulling in a film from a selection curated by Macs Adventure staff. Each tour can now have a film associated with it as well, with fullscreen and high definition capabilities. With new tabs, buttons, shadows, rollover effects, panels, typography, mobile phone optimisation, and much more, the new face of Macs Adventure makes for very pleasant viewing, accessibility, and usability indeed.

For the staff, we streamlined their back-end administrative area, creating 7 templates that cover all their needs. Macs Adventure is run on TourCMS, a popular booking agent software provider. Being TourCMS trusted design specialists, and having masses of experience with their software, we integrated these templates seamlessly into the backend. Now each tour, collection, and single page is linked to these templates, giving sitewide consistency, and turning their unwieldy old system into an efficient and easy to use administrative area, where most of the work is now automated for them. The result? Happy staff with a lot more free time.

From that very wise man...

"New site is going down a storm. Bounce rate has decreased massively and time on site/page views increased hugely so although it’s still too early to measure conversion rate changes I think it will have a hugely positive impact. Thanks to you all with your help on this."

Neil Lapping, CEO, Macs Adventure

http://www.macsadventure.com/walking-holidays.php

Please add a comment

Your email will not be publicly displayed.