Bahamas Tourism (2009)
Director: Stuart Rideout
Production: Rascal Films
Bahamas.com - a complete site overhaul
Upon winning The Bahamas business in November 2007, my team was tasked not only with creating a new advertising campaign for the Islands, but also with completely rebuilding the nation's iconic website Bahamas.com. We started completely from scratch, with IA working to determine the appropriate user-pathing for necessary site functions and UX working with the creative and graphic design teams to ensure that the user experience would be intuitive and enjoyable. Our IA and creative teams worked closely with various members of the Ministry of Tourism to translate 10,000 pages of often repetitive and sometimes incorrect information and imagery from the previous site into less than 3,000 pages of current, relevant and well-written material for the new site.
Our developers worked hand-in-hand with the Ministry of Tourism to determine the content management needs and built a back-end CMS to spec that would allow members of the Ministry of Tourism to easily take control of the content on the site, updating and maintaining it as needed.
We created several tools to make the site stickier and achieve the overall brand goal of increasing awareness about the number of islands available to vacation on in The Bahamas. The homepage main feature became an interactive map that included pithy information and video for each island at rollover and encouraged visitors to go deeper into the site to island-specific pages. The Trip Wizard used a simple and enjoyable personality test to match consumers with the right Bahamian island for their vacation. We also completely revamped the personalization feature of Bahamas.com (MyBahamas) and made it easier for people to register and have their information pre-populate in key areas throughout the site.
Because direct bookings on Bahamas.com benefited the Ministry of Tourism the most financially, we completed a large-scale RFP process to determine the best booking solution partner for the Ministry and negotiated the final deal once a partner was chosen. We also created several areas on the homepage and throughout the site that were dedicated to promotions, allowing us to increase conversion to bookings no matter where a site visitor entered.
The site was carefully tagged and indexed to ensure strong organic search results and overall trackability. Once the new site was launched, we provided weekly and monthly analytics reports and optimization recommendations.
It bears mentioning that the entire rebuild was done in three months, because the Ministry needed the new site up and running in time for the peak booking season.
The Bahamas.com website was recognized with several awards including a 2010 Web Marketing Association award for Outstanding Website, a 2009 Web Marketing Association award for Outstanding Achievement in Web Development (Travel Standard of Excellence) and a 2008 Gold ADDY award for Design.
Our developers worked hand-in-hand with the Ministry of Tourism to determine the content management needs and built a back-end CMS to spec that would allow members of the Ministry of Tourism to easily take control of the content on the site, updating and maintaining it as needed.
We created several tools to make the site stickier and achieve the overall brand goal of increasing awareness about the number of islands available to vacation on in The Bahamas. The homepage main feature became an interactive map that included pithy information and video for each island at rollover and encouraged visitors to go deeper into the site to island-specific pages. The Trip Wizard used a simple and enjoyable personality test to match consumers with the right Bahamian island for their vacation. We also completely revamped the personalization feature of Bahamas.com (MyBahamas) and made it easier for people to register and have their information pre-populate in key areas throughout the site.
Because direct bookings on Bahamas.com benefited the Ministry of Tourism the most financially, we completed a large-scale RFP process to determine the best booking solution partner for the Ministry and negotiated the final deal once a partner was chosen. We also created several areas on the homepage and throughout the site that were dedicated to promotions, allowing us to increase conversion to bookings no matter where a site visitor entered.
The site was carefully tagged and indexed to ensure strong organic search results and overall trackability. Once the new site was launched, we provided weekly and monthly analytics reports and optimization recommendations.
It bears mentioning that the entire rebuild was done in three months, because the Ministry needed the new site up and running in time for the peak booking season.
The Bahamas.com website was recognized with several awards including a 2010 Web Marketing Association award for Outstanding Website, a 2009 Web Marketing Association award for Outstanding Achievement in Web Development (Travel Standard of Excellence) and a 2008 Gold ADDY award for Design.