Visit Thanet Business

The brief

Having collaborated with Thanet District Council on a number of digital projects over the years, we were honoured to work with their Tourism Team on a new project to refresh their Business-to-Business (B2B) website, a vital tool for supporting their local businesses.

This website showcases their business support services, training opportunities and ways businesses can engage with the tourism team and their promotional activities.

This new digital project updates and refreshes the design and content, bringing the site up to date and relevant for businesses today and adds many features to improve their operations.

Our approach

From start to finish, we worked with the Tourism Team through each crucial milestone of the website redesign journey, from kick-off meeting to website launch.

Our journey began with a discovery session, where we listened and discussed the key goals the team would like to achieve with this website redesign for their customers.

Taking this information, we generated a new information architecture that reorganised the content into clearer sections, making the content more digestible and enhancing the overall user experience of the site. The team were looking for a modular page builder to maximise the flexibility of the content layout.

UI and UX

One of the main areas of improvement was establishing a strong navigational foundation for the site. This included replacing the existing flyout menu with a visually impactful mega menu, encouraging users to browse the relevant pages within each section quickly and efficiently.

Each section of the site features a distinct colour theme to enhance visual signposting for the user. These themes incorporate vibrant, welcoming tones, while lighter tints of these colours are used to ensure the content remains cohesive and fully compliant with WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards.

The website’s new font, colour palette, iconography, and button styling now align with Thanet District Council’s corporate branding. However, it retains a fresh and engaging appearance through high-quality imagery and graphical textures that mimic the coastal waves found around Thanet’s coastline, creating an inviting experience for its target audiences.

Website features

One of the key requirements of this project was offering access to a free image library for businesses to download high-resolution images to be used across any published features, promoting the amazing island and encouraging more people to visit.

The commercial-grade WP Sunshine Photo Cart plugin was the perfect solution for this requirement, allowing the Tourism team to create password-protected galleries where clients can view and download images in a clear step-by-step process.

To meet the project’s marketing goals, we designed an intuitive e-newsletter sign-up form for Tourism Matters. Integrating Gravity Forms and Brevo to sync newsletter signups, we created a visually engaging form that ensures a smooth user journey and reduced backend administration.

Testing and launch

Once the website build was complete, we conducted thorough Q&A testing across all devices and set up modular templates to allow easy setup of future pages for the client.

As part of our handover process, we provided the Tourism Team with a remote one-to-one website training session, as well as a bespoke PDF training guide.