At Flow Communications we often talk of a website being an organisation’s “shop window”. It’s where you place your best offerings front and centre, showcasing them in the best light.
CapeNature, the Western Cape’s natural environment guardian, recently unveiled its impressive new website, which Flow designed, developed and wrote some copy for.
“We were ecstatic to be appointed as the chosen agency to build a new website for CapeNature,” says Flow Cape Town manager Sarah-Jane Viljoen, who managed the website project. “It has been an amazing opportunity to reimagine the ‘shop window’ for a wonderful organisation that looks after some of the most beautiful nature reserves in the country.”
The objective was to create a natural, colourful, professional website with strong visuals and easy-to-use navigation that grows revenue and systematically packages CapeNature’s knowledge on biodiversity and conservation.
If you’ve had the privilege of spending time in the most beautiful parts of the Western Cape, then you’ve likely visited one of CapeNature’s reserves or protected areas. CapeNature is a government entity tasked with managing, protecting and maintaining a vast area of natural heritage in the Western Cape, made up of 113 nature reserves and wilderness areas, including six marine protected areas.
The new site showcases a wealth of information on biodiversity and conservation, and offers a fun space for children to learn more about nature.
UX/UI design
Flow’s designers had to tackle a high-level website structure that caters for several different user groups, including visitors to nature reserves, government stakeholders, the public and environmentalists.
This is a complex group of users with very different website requirements. Flow UX/UI designer Cara Wares solved this challenge by creating a set of wireframes to represent the user journey for each group, before translating these into a website design with a strong visual impact that gives users a clear route to the information they’re looking for.
Says Cara, “This project was a big challenge! It’s a massive website with beautiful imagery, and the team worked so well together, from user workshops to developing user flows and wireframes, writing content, creating designs, and seeing the project through to completion.
“It really was an amazing project to work on because nature is one of my passions, so this was inspirational,” says Cara.
Website development
Web developer Fabio de Abreu welcomed the challenge of building a site of this size: “It’s an extremely large site with a lot of integrated sections, so it was nice to be faced with such a challenge. I enjoyed working with a great team and how we tackled the workload together. I also enjoyed expanding my knowledge of the important work CapeNature does.”
Part of the brief was to include a resource library for both children and general users. “I tackled the resource library by breaking it up into two sections: for kids and the main library. I used specific query parameters as dropdown options to filter the resources and I brought it together with specific and multiple categorisations for each resource. This was a little tricky as they were very closely integrated,” says Fabio.
Says Sarah-Jane of the final product, “We created a destination that is more than just a website; it is a coming together of science and eco-tourism in an explosion of breathtaking visuals and fresh colours.”
And, most importantly, the client is happy with the new website. “The end product is as pleasing to the eye as it is functional,” says CapeNature general manager Petro van Rhyn.
