There was a lot we wanted to capture within the design of Whakarewarewa’s new website. As New Zealand’s only living Maori village the history, culture and stories of the village had to shine through, but we also wanted to emphasise the elements that overseas guests would remember with the bubbling blue geothermal pools and rising steam.

The final design – 100% unique and custom to Whakarewarewa on every page – heroes the experience of visiting the village itself. Billowing steam, native gardens, and inquisitive puekeko frame the story and history of this tourism icon.

Open source, built for longevity

One of the biggest weaknesses of the existing Whakarewarewa website was the closed-source platform that it was built on. Any changes to content had to be actioned by the agency who built it, with every change incurring a cost. This practice, while common, sits in direct opposition to the Maverick ethos. If its your website, you should have full access and control to change what you want.

Whakarewarewa’s new website was built on WordPress 4.9, and updated to 5.0 upon launch. WordPress still gets some flack from digital dinosaurs who see it as a blogging platform, but they couldn’t be more wrong. WordPress is the single most popular CMS in the world, used on 52% of the top million websites by traffic, and 32% of the top ten thousand. Known for its flexibility, ease of use, and fantastic developer support, WordPress is the obvious choice for most NZ Tourism operators, and definitely for Whakarewarewa in this case.

Lightning fast and conversion-driven

Any discussion with the web build team at Maverick is going to include load performance. Anyone browsing on a slow connection knows that a heavy, slow page is likely to get abandoned. This is especially true in tourism, where international roaming connections are notoriously bad.

Whakarewarewa was built to be lightning fast, despite the large amount of imagery and even video used on the site. There is no longer an excuse for slow sites, and the lighting fast load times for Whakarewarewa prove this.