Tourism Website for County Kildare

As a destination’s digital alter ego, a tourism website is the closest representation of what the “real thing” may feel like, and a visitor’s first impression profoundly impacts how the they perceive the destination’s brand. For these reasons Kildare Tourism concluded that their website needed a makeover. The current site was outdated, with lots of banner ads, generic descriptions, and superficial information. It was clearly unable to compete with well-established destinations and larger counties (with much larger budgets), many of whom have just recently updated their user experience.

Into Kildare had clear goals from the outset. They wanted a content-first, mobile-first tourism website design, aligned with the latest trends in destination marketing. They wanted a pulling mechanism that will attract, persuade, and speak to the hearts of modern visitors. And they wanted it in six months.

The challenge was a perfect fit for Journey. It required just the right mixture of user experience, visual design, and implementation expertise that enabled us to flex all of our creative muscles.

Our main challenge with this project was restructuring their entire site’s architecture. Their previous site was not user friendly and there was a mountain of content for us to categorise, consolidate, re-write and organise. Our experience in user journey-mapping combined with SEO expertise has resulted in a highly organised website navigation that makes sense for both site visitors and Google’s bots! The new website sitemap and user journey flows in the best way possible to maximise successful conversions, whilst ensuring that visitor’s time on the site is enjoyable and intuitive.

Another one of the key requirements from the new site was for a high Google page score and quick load times and Journey’s experience in this area is one of the key factors that led to our appointment. To achieve this, we created an entirely bespoke WordPress theme and hard-coded all functionality and most of the plugins. The site has gone from a 12 second load time to 2.7 seconds load time and we have improved their Google score from a 42 to 89. These results will help the new website to achieve a high Google ranking as well as retain a high number of users.

Delivering a website development project of this scale requires careful project management and attention to detail, as well as strong creative concepts to successfully appeal to a wide and varied target audience. After many months of collaboration and hard work from both the Into Kildare and Journey teams, it was finally time to share the new website we were all extremely proud of – a contemporary, exciting and highly stimulating new site that will help to establish Kildare as a world-class destination.