NB: This is a guest article by Pete Myers, vice president marketing and business development at EuroCheapo
There have been several fascinating articles in Tnooz over the past year about the various approaches online travel brands have taken to relaunching their websites.
From debating the merits of split testing to spending enormous budgets on site design, it’s clear there are many different, valid ways to approach a site’s new look.
But what if your budget has fewer zeros in it? Are you out of luck?
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways smaller travel companies can take a more frugal approach to large scale site redesigns while still packing a knockout punch.
At EuroCheapo, we followed a 'lean and mean' approach with our recent site relaunch. While many features remain on our wish list, the final product is a site that we’re proud of and that we’re confident will please our readers as well.
Here are a few of the guidelines we followed when relaunching 'à la Cheapo'.
It all starts with research:
Consumer research and site analytics can feel like a black hole. Our industry swirls with metrics and understanding what to focus on and what drives the business isn’t always easy. If you can't splurge on third party services or agencies, it doesn't mean you can't still embrace quantitative and qualitative data to help shape your site design and user experience.
Our approach was simple - mine our Google Analytics like crazy to understand our historic trending and performance.
Where are the bottlenecks? What pages have the highest abandonment rates and what can we learn from them? What is 'clogging the funnel' and how could we flush it out?
By isolating our highest value channels we could take a more focused view and resist becoming distracted by endless data.
Tip: Use Google's PageSpeed Insights to understand existing obstacles to optimal page load times. After all, we all want to be blazing fast, right?
This also helps establish speed benchmarks to test against future designs and releases.
Qualitatively, we talked to every person we knew (who wouldn't charge us). While there are several excellent services for survey-based online user testing that are fairly cheap, we opted for our own direct approach.
We used social media to recruit existing readers and relied on our personal networks to find travelers who had never used our site before. We conducted extensive in-office user testing and emailed surveys to guide us while choosing the new look.
Know what makes you special:
Being the best at one thing is an enormous challenge. Trying to be the best at many is impossible. By taking an honest assessment of your company's key value proposition, you can use your new design to highlight these strengths while focusing your development budget on these areas.
In our experience, this meant investing in -- and communicating the benefits of -- our budget hotel reviews and hotel search platform. Everything else was secondary.
Know when to skimp and when to spend:
Some things are too important to cut corners on. Prior to this launch, our company had a proud do-it-yourself legacy of handling most design in-house by non-designers who comfortably knew their way around Photoshop.
While this may be a fine way to manage costs, the value we received from hiring a design professional was profound. Travel sites have mere seconds to create a positive brand association with a new user. Spend the money to do so effectively.
On a similar note, if it takes more than three seconds for your site to load then you'll lose your audience before they can even see your fancy new look. Don't skimp on server costs.
In our case, we paid AWS for image hosting and Rackspace to provide 'fanatical support'. And we’re still hoping to significantly speed things up in future revisions. A fast site does wonders for leaving a lasting, positive impression.
Toot your horn:
You’ve worked hard to build a business that fills a need. Hopefully along the way you’ve received some complimentary audience feedback along with some press mentions.
Let people know. Toot your horn loud and proud. Add customer testimonials to your site. Update your press section and don’t keep it buried. Allow new, first-time site visitors to see you as an authority in your niche.
For EuroCheapo’s relaunch, we prioritized the visibility of our company's value proposition and added logos of major media outlets that have picked up 'our story' to many key landing pages.
Be bold:
You know those tiny thumbnail photos you’ve had on your templates forever? Toss ‘em. Do whatever you can to update your images and feature large format, high resolution photographs that inspire your visitors and keep them glued to your site. Be big, bold and aspirational.
It was time consuming, but we recropped thousands of photos... and still have many to go. We prioritized the recropping project by starting with our most important destinations.
And while we’re at it: Are your headlines' font sizes too small? It may be time to consider an upgrade. Go large!
Mobile first? Or maybe second?
What's your mobile design strategy? How important is mobile access to your bottom line? If you have limited resources, there has to be some cross platform (not to mention cross browser) prioritization that ensures the best possible user experience for the highest number of users, even if it means secondary channels receive a secondary user experience for the initial release.
We used responsive design techniques to make our user experience as uniform as possible between web, tablet and smartphones. It’s not perfect, but it’s a big step forward for us. In future releases we’ll work on simplifying the page that we serve to smaller screens, to make it load faster and improve the mobile experience.
If, however, you find yourself obsessing that a title wraps on a phone's portrait view, yet phone usage accounts for only 2% of site visits and .02% of your revenue, it's time to move on. You can fix it when it becomes a higher priority. Which leads us to...
Ship it!
The best planning, research, design and speed don't mean a thing if the product is constantly behind a wall and hidden from your customer's fingertips. Take it live.
“But IE6 shows a mysteriously floating tab!” Take it live.
“But I just thought of one cool addition that will take no time at all, I promise!” Take it live.
Know the difference between bugs and features, and take it live. After all, this isn't your last launch, and you’re about to make your site dramatically better. Good luck!
NB: This is a guest article by Pete Myers, vice president marketing and business development at EuroCheapo