Tourism Ireland Revamp
We have said it 1,000 times before and we will say it another 10,000 times - Your website is never finished.
A website design and implementation, we see as a birth. You are launching your business, brand or community out into the world, and hope that that baby grows beyond your wildest plans. As with any baby (and keeping the allegory going) you have to nurture and look after it to make sure it succeeds in life. Along the way change will happen to your project, especially out on the internet. Sometimes change takes the form of a change of clothing, sometimes the change is more fundamental.
We have implemented a big change recetly to the Tourism Ireland Image Library. This was a project we developed four years ago with great success. The online community that Tourism Ireland were reaching out to responded by signing up to the site, and used the facilities from all over the world. The design was to-the-minute and the concepts were clear.
Through the process of using the site, and taking on suggestions from their community of art directors and agencies, Emagine Media have worked closely with Tourism Ireland to adjust the site's functionality and usability. A case study for this type of adjustment is the advanced search facilities.
Originally, the advanced search was created as a series of drop-down lists, with specific categories and keywords a user could pick to filter down the images they wanted to see. This was a good way of approaching things at the start when the catalogue was small and the user base even smaller.
As time went on, Tourism Ireland looked for a quicker and more usable search. Two examples of the problems encountered were:
1. The new search had to be moved away from the original 'lets-submit-a-form-over-and-over-again-until-we-find-what-we-want' approach. Users were getting frustrated as there was so much to look for and so little time.
2. The number of keywords had also grown beyond a manageable amount in one list without the user getting lost.
As the community and support questions grew, and the technologies of the web changed, we adjusted. Cue the new advanced search.
The technology used was modernised and a search form with more instant gratification was created. Items were broken up into more decipherable lists and instant results are returned to the user. Partial and exact search filters are broken down with an image count, as well as the images available for each word picked. All of this happens before submitting any form.
With the change in technology, the design of the site got a once-over. The orginal design, although good for the time, proved to be a bit clunky after a while. As more and more features got added to the pages, the pages became more crowded.
The design has gone to a more minimal range of tones. Images and accented areas are made more prominent through the use of muted tones, and multiple drop down navigation elements have been changed to a simpler 1-level navigation with a subnav.
The new design was implemented and launched and has been very well received by the client and the 3000+ users to the system.
Happy clients make us happy.
