The Ring of Cork brand, with their new site, aims to increase Tourism to the East Cork region in Ireland. The brand is run by the South & East Cork Tourism who needed a new website to showcase the facilities, activities, attractions, festivals, food and craft fairs of each town within the Ring of Cork and to help both locals and tourists find all of the above.
After a long and detailed process we were delighted to be selected to build the Ring of Cork site.
High on SECAD's list of requirements were:
a design that was distinctive, vibrant and clearly showed it was targetted at tourists
a system that allowed easy additions of new listings and updates
a fast way to add news and events
a mobile friendly design approach so tourists could use the site while touring around with a mobile device
easy to do SEO
We chose to build the site in WordPress, as it offers a fairly straightforward interface for adding and updating content as well as good SEO tools.
One the main challenges for the website was in how we structured the content to make it easy for tourists to find online. Each town needed to have accommodation listings as well as other types of listings such as Activities, Craft & Fairs and Food and Dining. A visitor to the region needs to be able to find:
Accommodation (or other listing types) across the entire region
Accommodation (or other listing types) in a particular town
All listings in a particular town
Fast navigation to relevant content (e.g. from restaurants in Midleton to restaurants in Youghal)
Technically, we decided to separate two types of listings, one for Accommodation (which required detailed information such as check in and check out times and accommodation types such as Hotel or a Hostel) and one for all the other listings (Crafts and Fairs, Food and Dining and so on). Each of these were supported by custom post types.
In addition the site makes it easy to add new locations and new listings types, so it can grow as the brand develops.
The project was delivered, as all our project are, on time and on budget. The clients have, so far, been delighted. Billy Mulqueen, Tourism Marketing Officer for South & East Cork Tourism, said:
StudioForty9 paid more attention (than any other company tendering) to specifying our requirements. They worked closely with us during the implementation, tweaking where necessary and advising where not, until we reached a solution for which we have received nothing but positive feedback.
South & East Cork Tourism are launching Ring of Cork this weekend. The team there are dedicated and very aware of their customers, so we know they'll make a success.