Royal Leamington Spa
With Royal Leamington Spa recently ranked the happiest place to live, this vibrant town has a lot to promote, and it remains a very desirable area in the UK.
Historically renowned for its famous spa, Leamington now not only offers history but also a great location for entertainment hunters, shoppers and food fans.
The BID Leamington team tasked Identity Studio with rebuilding the existing Royal Leamington Spa (RLS )website. The new site needed to represent all the BID-registered stores in the town by showcasing them well, whilst also promoting the town to locals and visitors alike.
Project Details
Client: BID Leamington
Skills: Brand Identities, Copywriting, Graphic Design, Website Design
Style: Clean, Commercial, Corporate, Engaging
The Background
It is no exaggeration to say that the previous website was huge. It had evolved and expanded to such a level, and was housing so much information, that it was starting to creak a little under the weight. Not only did it have details of hundreds of stores, it also included entertainment listings, news articles, competitions and more.
The task was to take the massive amount of data, that the old site had accumulated, and build it into a new website that not only enhanced the user experience of navigating the website, but also make it easier for the BID Leamington team to keep it up-to-date behind the scenes.
Careful Planning
As with all projects, the first thing to do was work on a site map and structure. This was more prevalent than ever with the amount of shops that needed representing. Searching the old site for various shopping types had become cumbersome.
It was important that users could use various filters to fine-tune their searches on the new site – along with the new requirement of needing listings not only for stores, but for multiple sectors too.
The ability to show timed special offers, events and competitions was also required. Whilst also promoting the area with information pages for visiting, living and running a business in Leamington, along with news articles.
Building the Site
With the business directory core to how most of the information was to be presented, this was the starting point. One issue was most of the content from the previous website was simply added to pages as basic text. There was no convenient way of pulling out the various key elements, such as opening times, contact details etc, without manually doing so.
Learning from this, behind the scenes, the new site was built from the core so all key information would be saved in designated areas of the database and assigned to each business. Business categories and sub categories were also worked in with a similar requirement.
The ability to quickly assign organisations to the audited categories was needed, along with adding new categories as stores evolved. Assigning all this data in designated parts of the database also meant that exporting this data at the end of this website’s life would be more manageable.
Once built, the task of manually placing the old site’s data into the new system was vast. At launch, well over 300 companies had been added. This was accomplished while also inputting data for new information, such as social media links.
Importance of Photography
Promoting the local area with good photography was fundamental to the success of the project. Achieving this with big sections, such as the homepage, were simple enough. However, collating all the businesses imagery for the directory listings was a challenge.
The old website used small, irregular, images – most not suitable for the new website. In standardising the image size to a 4:3 format, obtaining new images was accomplished by providing a private web form for BID Members to submit their photographs. The form automatically resized very large submitted images to an appropriate web friendly size, thereby simplifying the directory population on the new website.
Extra Member Feature
Post launch, an enhanced version of this form is now in operation which allows new and old BID Members to submit their details. This captures not only imagery, but also service descriptions and tick boxes for all the various categories and sub categories of the businesses – making it easier for BID members to provide content for future directory population.
User Experience
Front end, all this structured information meant filterable search elements could be built into the site. For example, in the large Eat & Drink section, this enables users to select restaurants, along with cuisine styles and various other facilities, to fine-tune their searches.
Visual devices were also made to promote various significant events, such as the Food Festival. The RLS branding had a broad palette of colours. The ability to switch core colours was built into the site, so seasonally the website’s colours could be changed, along with the photography used on key pages. The ability to add videos, rather than images, has been integrated too, for certain times of the year.
We continue to enhance the website post launch with many new pages planned as the site, and town, develops.
“Thank you so so much, the site looks fabulous! I am so very grateful to have Identity Studio as part of our team. I hugely appreciate the commitment and hours behind the scenes as I know there are many. We would be lost without you. This is such a huge and good job done.”
Stephanie Kerr,
Executive Director,
BID Leamington
“Thank you so so much, the site looks fabulous! I am so very grateful to have Identity Studio as part of our team. I hugely appreciate the commitment and hours behind the scenes as I know there are many. We would be lost without you. This is such a huge and good job done.”
Stephanie Kerr, Executive Director,
BID Leamington
