The challenge

Cornwall is the jewel in the crown of the British tourist industry, thanks to its rugged landscape and beautiful sunny beaches, in excess of five million visitors can’t be wrong. The trouble was that the Visit Cornwall website struggled to keep up with the popularity of the place. Not only was it a bit long in the tooth on the surface, but underneath the technology that supported the site no-longer met the growing needs of the Cornwall Development Company.

What Cornwall needed was an open-standards-powered website which could scale to meet the needs of the region and a partner with the capability and vision to produce a site worthy of the Celtic nation of Kernow. Step in, Nameless with our CMS platform of choice for 'enterprise-level' requirements, Drupal.

Our approach

If you’re designing a site for 1.5 million digital visitors and suppliers of all shapes and sizes it makes sense to prepare and research your audience.

Thankfully the Cornwall Development Company had a wealth of research on their audiences, so our task was made easier than it might have been. That said, we augmented that knowledge with some guerrilla research with audience groups, using the KJ method, which is a fantastic method for capturing opinion evenly across large groups.

Armed with personas we embarked upon the sketchboarding and prototyping stages of the project, before entering the design phase.

Our strategy for the site was to show the breadth of content Cornwall has to offer whilst making it easy to find what’s of interest to a specific visitor. To strike this balance we created a "Customise Your Visit" tool using faceted search, powered by Apache Solr and OpenLayers™ dynamic mapping to help illustrate trip options in a meaningful way.

The results

The new Visit Cornwall site sets the standard in destination websites. The beauty of Cornwall now has a platform on which to shine and most importantly be found, both by Google and the user.

Drupal provides a robust basis for the content, allowing the multiple categories within the site to be managed and delivered to the user meaningfully. The Drupal administration interface allows the Cornwall Development Company to maintain the content easily.

The unique features offered by VisitCornwall.com are already winning favour among users as the website has been shortlisted for the British Travel Awards 2012 'Best UK Visitor Guide Website'.