The Brief
The WDTA and Whitby Beacon Town Forum wanted a site that:
becomes THE marketing vehicle for the town
is content rich, and contains lots of articles and information about the town and the surrounding area
they had control over - they wanted the facility to add and amend pages and update news and events on a daily basis
provides visitor statistics and analysis - vital for their marketing
is W3C compatible and CSS driven
The website needed to include accommodation listings for Whitby hotels, Whitby cottages, Whitby B&B, and Whitby Caravan and Camping sites - as well as details of local visitor attractions and places to eat.
It was also necessary to make the site partly self-funded and Bow House were commissioned to sell entries on the website to accommodation providers.
The Work
This is an ongoing partnership - a major tourism project. We began by working on a design for the site and sourcing images before building the site structure. Most of the information pages were put up by the tourism associations using a Content Management System.
Accommodation for visitors is listed in a separate database-driven section which is managed by Bow House, as are a number of display advertisements that appear throughout the site.
The Outcome
The result is a very attractive and successful website with healthy and growing visitor numbers, excellent search engine rankings and a high proportion of repeat advertisers each year.
Members of the Whitby Beacon Town Forum and WDTA keep the site regularly updated so visitors can benefit from local news, events and tourist information.
