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South Sea Cruises Website Project
The Opportunity
The team at SSC approached us to work with them on a totally new website project which needed to solve several issues:
- The existing site was not designed with the user in mind; the path to conversion was a clunky and confusing process. SSC had recently made a significant investment in a new booking platform and widget (recommended and designed by Maverick) for Resort Transfers to improve the visibility of the booking process with a “2 clicks to booking” goal and they needed a website to help deliver on their goals.
- The content on the old site, while informative, was focused on selling Fiji as a destination, rather than promoting SSC products and services to an audience who has already decided to travel to Fiji.
- The website’s outdated CMS platform severely limited the SSC team’s ability to update content and have full ownership of their brand online. They needed a new site on a more modern platform to allow them to update and add content as needed, quickly and efficiently.
The Solution
We worked with the team at SSC to develop a plan for a new website to tackle the issues head-on:
Booking system integration
Maverick Digital worked closely with the new booking engine partner to improve the buying journey by creating a product that looks and works BETTER than the inspiration for the development. Our expertise guided the design of the new path to purchase for customers, utilising our extensive experience in creating seamless user journeys to improve conversions. By integrating the booking engine and custom-built Resort Transfers widget, we were able to remove the confusing steps from the booking journey to allow for a more seamless and straightforward path to conversion.
Content Rationalisation
This is all about ‘show don’t tell’. The navigation on the previous website was bloated with a lot of unnecessary information that got in the way of the booking process for customers. The new website, with a more refined main navigation, offers a clean and flexible platform to feature SSC products clearly for key audiences. The goal for this new site was to ensure every page has a purpose, and in the process, we removed all content that didn’t fit that goal. We have put more of an emphasis on bright, sunny and tropical images and video, rather than text, to inspire travel and help people dream about their holiday.
Build Technologies
The new website has been built on WordPress and is hosted on Maverick Digital’s Cloud-based servers to allow for a lightning-fast user experience from anywhere in the world – essential for an international market! Moving to a modern, opensource platform has vastly improved the flexibility around updating the website, including all imagery and video content, and allows the SSC to be nimble and create one-off pages as and when needed.
The Results
We compared the first full month (October 1 – 31 2023) with the same period last year to get a gauge on how the new website is performing and, we think the numbers speak for themselves…
- Engaged sessions up 51.39%
- Engagement rate up 48.97%
- Engaged sessions per user up 43.49%
- Engagement time up 20.84%
- Event count (page view) up 96.58%
The new, highly visual website with improved booking functionality and user experience is resulting in more engaged people spending longer and looking at more pages on the site – we’re stoked with how it’s performing so far!
Related Work
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