Longleat has been one of the UK’s best-loved attractions for over 60 years. Featuring the UK’s No.1 Safari Park; a Main Square jam packed with fabulous attractions; and majestic Longleat House, one of the most stunning stately homes in Britain.
Following an extensive re-branding exercise, Longleat tasked Feelingpeaky with the delivery of a responsive website to reinforce their brand image and overall customer experience. The vision was to deliver a website that was fully responsive and mobile ready; to create an online experience that evokes Longleat’s inherent mission and core values of wondrous, real, pioneering, immersive and heritage; to compliment the look and feel of their new brand identity; and ultimately to drive more online ticket purchasing and more visits to Longleat.
Initial usability testing, audience and analytics research helped us to drive website strategy and structure the website to be more intuitive and support website goals. The new Longleat responsive website design re-enforces and delivers the ‘real’ Longleat experience. Feelingpeaky designed and created a digital environment that showcases the best of Longleat, bringing the creative to life with real and immersive imagery and video whilst ensuring the site was highly focused on driving sales. Mobile visits now account for the majority of visits. The new website had a huge impact on conversion rates driving multiple £millions in ticket sales.
We wanted the design to look classic and be intuitive. People should feel excited about planning their trip to Longleat rather than being distracted by design flourishes in the interface. To achieve this we used earthy tones as the main colours for the interface with the addition of the Longleat brand colours as highlights. A “find it fast” information key was anchored to the side of the screen allowing the user to scroll and yet still find out all they key information they need to know before making their purchase decision. The typography was clear leaving a simple, understated design.
With a rich blend of imagery, video and content the visual language displayed is engaging and immersive. The interface has a clean and simple aesthetic to help users navigate the site. The modular building components allows for an intuitive responsive website that can be easily managed.
We wanted the interface to be visually powerful whilst maintaining consistency. The overall results deliver a distinct sense of unity to the website.
It was important for us to communicate this sense of unity via clear and highly consistent structures, backgrounds, colour palette, navigational tools and tone of voice.
At an earlier stage of the project we’d mapped out the site architecture and navigation for the new website. The drop down navigation presents a clean, simple and elegant way finding system for the target audience. Helping them to get to all the key website information as efficiently as possible. The main website navigation adapts across from desktop to mobile, whilst retaining the style elements. Supporting the main navigation is a ‘Find it fast’ block of icons stuck to the side of the screen. This provides links to the key pieces of information to help the visitor make a purchase decision.
The whole website was built using the Ember.js framework. A framework designed for ambitious web applications – which Longleat certainly counts as one.
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