Coves, culture and Cornish pasty

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.

The Task

Armed with a clear audience understanding 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 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’.