Tucan Travel
Homepage Redesign
For quite some time I had wanted to redesign the homepage of Tucan Travel's website as I had been working with the company for a few years by this point. Main projects over the last year were mainly focusing on new content creation for building a stronger ranking for SEO purposes so researching and competitor analysis were key into planning what would be built But things never came to that moment as more important tasks would be delivered to me, but it was in my intentions to eventually get onto redesigning this webpage.
Finally, that day came and I wanted to strip back most of what was originally created for the homepage and give it a new look and feel to the company. Unfortunately, the time came during Covid-19 so travel was at it's worst moment for the industry. However, it was a time to seize the opportunity to prepare the website for the moment that the travel industry would be back in business.
Previous page design
After reviewing over the previous layout and design of Tucan Travel's homepage I fealt quite bored and not that enthused about looking into anywhere to travel. There were sections in the homepage not functioning properly as there was meant to be a list of tours that would be displaying offers and even I noticed some of the styling wasn't consistent throughout the page. Plus overall it reminded me of a boring Word doc with eveything most the text being centre aligned as that seemed to be the solution to alot of things when I would look over redesigning pages within the site.
So it was time for a bit of an overhaul, and a freshen up of the homepage as for some this page would be the first look at the company as a whole.
The Concept Process
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When it comes to creating the concept in HTML code I like to have a plan of action that gives the process build, structure. From sketching out ideas and layouts to taking that into mock designs in Photoshop and seeing what I want to adjust, this process I feel gives me a clear thought on what is working and what is not. Initially, the ideas created in the sketched plan, the team were keen to see implemented into the website as they brought a fresh new look and feel to the page. A couple of things changed once building the concept and attempting in tests with HTML. These we just minor adjustments like removing the introduction for the Tucan Travel blog as each blog post not only would link to the individual page but under that, I would now include a button linking to the homepage of the blog.
The layout of the 'Travel Inspiration' would change by widening the blogs creating more space, so the Youtube videos could adjust slightly. Instead of the stack of three, the layout would have one large video and two smaller positioned beneath, also including a backlink to the Tucan Travel Youtube page.
Final look of the
Tucan Travel Homepage
A few revisions were made and main reasons were to just try cut the amount length of the page as I felt it was a lot of scrolling in mobile format. Plus March 2020 proved to be the foreseen future, a struggle around our working day environment, due to the impact Covid-19, and I was asked to include promotional sales sections and reassurance as to why you should choose to travel with the company.
So the layout adjusted slightly and a urgency to gain interest using low deposits extra sales campaigns, due to the travel industry taking a massive blow, restrictions became in place around the world for any travel to go ahead through a pandemic.
A large green banner at the top for £1/$1/€1 deposits to gain client interest was included. This also repeated in place of one of the tours to the right in the 'Recommended Tours' section.
Additionally, in these examples, I have included how I would have asked the developers to adjust the header and footer as the current layouts aren't great. They just needed a little tidying and adjustment for simple navigation.
Finally once happy with the coded design in Dreamweaver I would then upload into the Joomla CMS system and test the page for mobile format as well as go over the SEO before signing off.
Once done we would monitor the pages performance to test if the redesign would be effective and we'd collect data from Google Analytics, Hotjar and SEMRush.