An Industry Leader
This is the fifth iteration of the Tourism Winnipeg design since the organization restructured about 14 years ago. Having undergone a rebranding in the last year or so, Tourism Winnipeg was looking to integrate that new brand into their online presence. A clean layout with updated brand colouring was the priority. A restructuring of content, new functionality, and improved user experience have led to what is close to the forefront of Tourism Industry websites.
Home Page Panel
One of the essential changes to the site was to provide a panel on the home page that has links to what Tourism Winnipeg views as the primary locations that tourists planning a visit to Winnipeg would want to view. We set up a four piece sliding promotion block to provide the visitor instant access to packages and deals. That was followed by a grid of the six most visited sections of their site. Below this is a short list of current and upcoming events taking place in and around the city. As an added feature, there is a hotel booking widget to get any potential visitor started on the path to their trip to Winnipeg.
Attraction & Event Filtering
To give the visitor a more customized user experience the filtering of Attraction and Event profiles was modified to allow the visitor to reduce the large number of profiles down to a manageable group that focuses on their interests, location, and timing of their visit. Additionally for the attractions, there is now a Near Me feature that provides the visitor with a list of additional attractions that are near their current location.
My Itinerary
In the past the Tourism Winnipeg website had a minor feature that allowed the visitor to build out an itinerary of sorts. They could select attractions and events that they were interested in and would compile them into a group for their specific visit. This was moderately well used, but was primarily a feature that the staff used to build itineraries on the fly for potential visitors who would call in to discuss a trip to Winnipeg. With this in mind and in consultation with the staff who used this feature the most, we rebuilt the functionality to be much more robust. The visitor can now share a link to their itinerary by sending an email, or sharing the URL on social media.
The online version contains all of the relevant location information for their selected attractions and events along with an image of the location or event. A Google Map display with pins of the attractions appears between the chosen attractions and the events. Should they decide to print their itinerary, only the relevant printed information will be printed as we don't want to waste all of that expensive printer ink on images.
The Blogs
Tourism Winnipeg has moved its blogs into its main website. Previously these blogs had their own domain names and they felt that the detached domains didn't link well with their new branding. Now the redesigned look to the site have the blogs maintaining that branding. By having the blogs within the main site, it has allowed us to build functionality that gives the staff at Tourism Winnipeg to associate blog articles directly with Attractions, Neighbourhoods, or Events.