discovergreece.com

Implementing an immersive experience

The Mindset and the Inspiration: The way we approached the rebranding and the redesigning of the digital platform was by turning to the essence of Greece and its beauty and drawing inspiration from it. Thus, the colour palette which we chose as  predominant throughout the website, is primarily composed of three colours: blue, yellow and white. As these colours are indicative of and strongly associated with the country.

The goal: The aim was to redesign the web portal to convey a new era in Tourism; one that emphasises on immersive experiences and does away with the old-fashion practices.

The digital platform was redesigned to communicate to the whole world a new, upgraded perspective about Tourism in Greece, emphasising on discoveries; conveying a new approach focusing on experiences instead of destinations, alone. 

The Redesigning process

In a nutshell: The web portal was changed and revamped, modernised to meet the needs of a demanding new era in Tourism. Where exploration moves away from a destination-focused promotion and uncovers a whole world of experiences waiting to be enjoyed. 

The content created is inspirational and aims at communicating emotions, feelings and experiences. The aim was not to promote direct sales and deliver conversions but to inspire the visitors and to take them on a digital journey around Greece.

Redesigning and Rebranding: The website became more modern and the design introduced an innovative horizontal scrolling on the page. This gives the website a magazine-like feel allowing the user to glide through the pages unfolding and discovering amazing experiences. Creating a website that not only looks beautiful but it feels cosy and welcoming too.

We opted for a magazine style design allowing for a step-by-step discovery on the website, a page-by-page inspiration. This makes content discovery more interactive and from a designer’s point of view, content items are neither crammed up nor stuffed together. On the contrary, this approach allows for swiftly and wittily, presenting a lot of interesting content while the website still feels good and looks clean-cut and not overwhelming. 

What is more, an interactive map of the country allows the user to choose between destinations and discover an abundance of experiences. The site is in itself a celebration of the power of experience. You can scroll through regions and destinations on the interactive map and discover Greece in all of its beauty, page by page. 

We put a lot of hard work and effort into the aesthetics of the website and took advantage of the power of beauty in design. Turning away from a dull, frivolous and often verbose design to a more laconic branding approach; one that enables the beauty of the brand to stand out.

The Content: The new digital platform was populated with amazing content , easily-shareable, aiming at creating a dazzling experience for the user; not just by including detailed articles listing the things-to-do by destination, giving useful information and sharing experiences-to-enjoy. But also by using the power of photography and enriching the content with captivating and vivid images evoking emotion and feeding the imagination.

Getting a bit technical: The new website not only had to be redesigned in terms of its aesthetics, content and rebranding so as to meet the modernised needs of Tourism, but it also needed revamping from a technical perspective. In order for it to become faster, more responsive and of course more intuitive. Namely we created: 

• A geographical region identifier to direct the visitor to their native language, written content, homepage. Personalising the experience by language.
• An interactive map of the regions supported by integrating powerful and customizable Mapbox platform in the design.
• A more intuitive experience using a built-in, fast & reliable search engine with an autocomplete suggester (powered by Apache Solr engine).
• An open end extensible platform by enabling integrations with 3rd party services like SkyScanner, WebHotelier and TripAround.
• A website that is progressively decoupled (using React Javascript Library) to enable multiple entry points. While users navigate the website at their own ease, the area of the website labeled Partners is an area dedicated to Tourism and Hospitality professionals. They can easily join the platform from a different entry point where they can register their business, subscribe and pay online for their promotion (Business registration section).
• A faster website by boosting its performance and speeding up the loading times by applying mechanisms of advanced caching logic to serve content to the users blazingly fast. 

Takeaway: For us at Wedia this was a great opportunity to redesign Tourism for Greece by emphasising on the dynamics of experience for the user. To rebrand Tourism by redesigning the main web portal, in order to meet the updated needs of the travellers in the new century; where the user is in the center of the experience. We aimed at displaying Greece through a journey of unfolding discoveries, guiding the user to a new era of hospitality, where experience holds the key to the destination. 

We did our best to swiftly display the beauty of Greece through opting for a laconic branding; where the colours imply Greece at its best and the design is wittily promoting the breathtaking content without overwhelming the user. Striking a balance between the impact of the content and the subtle design, which gives space to the beauty and the experiences to unfold. 

This was a great collaboration between the experienced teams of Discover Greece and Wedia and we are thrilled and honoured to have been given the opportunity to present to the whole world Greece as we see it. As a beautiful place to be discovered filled with enchanting experiences.