• All
• Brand Design
• Motion
• Digital

• Clients
  • ATARI
  • Axis
  • BBC: World Challenge
  • Daily Mail
  • EcoRIG
  • Guardian Unlimited
  • Harewood
  • McDonalds
  • My Peak Potential
  • NELFT
  • NHS
  • Northern Art Prize
  • Sesame
  • Yorkshire Forward
  • Yorkshire Water
  •  
• Services
  • motion
  • print
  • digital
  • branding
  • 3D
  •  

Harewood

THE BRIEF

Create a new website for Harewood House, Yorkshire’s finest stately home with a design that is still in keeping with the traditional Harewood experience to appeal to its existing customers. The new site must be more commercial than previous years and offer visitors the opportunity to book online.

THE SOLUTION

We undertook extensive research into the needs and opinions of stakeholder groups from across the Harewood organisation by holding a variety workshops to understand the requirements of the new website.

The use of big imagery and rotating photography was used on the new site to create high visual impact and showcase the experiences found at Harewood. The site was designed to be aesthetically appealing to the visitor whilst functionally easy to use, with a hide and show content system. To create the online booking facility, we worked with TCS Gold to incorporate the previous booking system into the new website and link this to the new content management system.

We incorporated interactive and downloadable tools, to host up-to-date information on each area of the house and gardens, to enable visitors to the site the ability to plan their forthcoming trips to Harewood with ease.

Within the website we developed a ‘My Harewood’ section, which is an area of the site that visitors can personalise to suit their own tastes and interest. Viewers can choose from a list of preferences to select relevant news feeds and events that they would like to hear more about. This section includes a built in ‘Pie Chart’ which enables a Harewood visitor to visually see at a glance what experiences they have enjoyed at Harewood and what there is still to do at the stately home.

THE RESULT

The new website, which launched in September 2009 was a great success and received a lot of positive feedback from venue staff and visitors. Its operational functionality as well as its engaging visual design appealed to customers and ensured it was more commercial than the previous one.

The ‘My Harewood’ section provided a data capture opportunity that was helpful in segmenting the users of the venue to target each individually and specifically with relevant campaigns of interest, this again helped to improve the commerciality of the site.

Since its launch earlier this month, Harewood has already seen improved Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and is currently ranking number one for one of its key search terms ‘Yorkshire Penguins,’ and numbers two and four for ‘Stately Home Leeds’ and ‘Stately Home Yorkshire’. The revised email templates are also helping to improve open rates (up to 49%), click through rates, segmentation and revenue per email campaign.

Tweet. Tweet