Visitors to southafrica.net over the past few days would have been the first to experience the website’s new look and feel – bigger pictures, cleaner design and a generally modern approach to offering users useful content. But, as with much of what ends up online, the process that led to this update has been long and complicated – but one that Flow has taken great pride in completing.
South African Tourism approached Flow Communications about six months ago, asking for our assistance in auditing all its existing content, as well as re-categorising it so that it is more easily accessible for website visitors. The project entailed a number of different elements:
- Checking and rewriting/updating about 4 000 articles across the website, making them fresh, original and current
- Simplifying the navigation of the site, and how articles are categorised, so that it is more user-friendly and intuitive. The simplified categories have also made the site a little faster
- Redesigning article pages to show off the content in a cleaner, more modern way. The new design is much more visual, displaying large images that load quickly. The new layout also displays short blurbs and basic contact info in a new way
- Adding real-time social media buttons for people to share articles on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+
- Creating “overview sections” that help expose the depth and richness of the content on the site, and building lazy-loading functionality so the articles in a theme load as the user scrolls down the page. We have done these for South Africa’s biggest cities, top destinations, World Heritage Sites and other major themes
- Producing a new Guide to South Africa, aimed at helping first-time international visitors to plan their trip and make the most of it. This is an overview of the country, how to get here, how to get around, etc.
- Designing and programming a new search functionality specifically for attractions and activities, so that users are able to find what they are looking for faster and easier
“The scale of this project was daunting,” says Andrea Weiss, who headed up the content side of things. “Thousands of articles needed to be reviewed in terms of their currency, content and accompanying images. This led us to develop a rather elaborate, colour-coded system on an enormous spreadsheet, which several people worked on simultaneously.
“In the end, we deleted around 1 100 articles, but that still left a good 3 000 that needed to be worked on. It’s great to see the end result of all this hard work in the new design, which allows the images to do the talking – which is as it should be in our visual world.”
Ryan Levenson, the lead designer for the project, says: “Our main focus was packaging the content so that it is easier for users to access, creating fluid, exciting user journeys.”
Tinashe Gunda was the lead developer responsible for turning the designers’ ideas into actual, working code. “The thing I’m most proud of is the custom social media integration. That was a new initiative,” he says.
Go explore the new website for yourself: www.southafrica.net