Project Overview
With over 38 years in business, adventure+ has grown into Australia’s leading commercial playground designer and manufacturer. It needed a new, lead-generation focused website that was able to expertly promote its full service offering and extensive product and spare parts range (exceeding 1,000 items) to its broad range of B2B clients.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Flavio Argemi - Creative Director & UX+UI Designer
Aled Rayner - UX+UI Designer
Jon Low - Technical Director
Jordan Binskin - Web Developer
Justin Low - Web Developer
Tiago Brito - Web Developer
Brenton Cannizzaro - Content + Project Manager
Tony Corrales - Operations Manager
Project Brief
Established in 1983, adventure+ has grown into a leading organisation, serving a wide range of commercial B2B clientele across education, local government, property development and hospitality. This success had led to it delivering hundreds of leading commercial playground projects, backed by an extensive product range and services covering strategic consultation, design, manufacturing and after sales maintenance service.
The new website had to overcome the deficiencies of its previous website, which was slow loading, hard to intuitively navigate (over 1,400 pages), failed to adequately communicate its custom design services and comprehensive playground design process, and lacked presentation wow factor in both product and case study presentation.
Equally important was the requirement to deliver a more robust and scalable web platform to house the shear volume of content and different content types, support functional requirements, and improve performance in web page load speed.
Project Innovation/Need
To achieve the project goals, we created a leading-edge web platform that was a custom Headless website development, utilising WordPress as the CMS. The term “headless” comes from the concept of removing the “head” (front-end) of the website from the “body” (the back-end CMS and the content repository).
The front-end development was created in the Next.js React framework, and is hosted on next-generation web hosting with multiple servers via global CDN (Content Delivery Network). The website back-end is housed on dedicated Cloud based Hosting with Amazon AWS. The web-servers dynamically connect via Git to deploy content updates from the back-end to the front-end.
The headless approach delivers enormous benefits, specifically with page load speed and website security. This approach was imperative to deliver on one of the main website goals, which was to improve website page load speed.
Combined with the headless development model, we integrated Algolia technology, a leading content Search and Discovery Platform that delivers world class user experiences through instant search and content filtering display.
Design Challenge
From our strategy process, we knew that adventure+’s different customer groups all required intuitive, fast access to different content areas; from the landscape architect wanting to easily find detailed product specifications for design and planning purposes, through to an early learning centre just starting their discovery process and needing to both understand the playground design process and possibilities that exist in new playground design.
Accordingly, the Information Architecture had to provide simple, clear navigation design that provided direct access to the different website sections. This challenge was achieved through strategic and considered UX and UI design, aided by the use of Algolia technology that allows instant filtering of content in key Index site sections to allow the different customer groups to quickly find the content that relates to their needs. Through totally customisable category tags within the website CMS, adventure+ is able to continuously refine content categories to ensure its wealth of content can easily be searched for and filtered by website users.
With so much content housed within the site, adventure+ also require the ability to powerfully structure and present content easily and with flexibility within the CMS. To meet this requirement, dedicated website templates were created for the different content sections, all consisting of structured layout components combined with flexible modules that can be utilised in different ways, yet in a consistent information delivery and brand approach.
User Experience
The design and technology approach implemented for the project has delivered substantial user experience benefits.
Most significantly is with web page load speed, which has improved by a staggering 70%.
Other user experience improvements has been recorded across the board, including increases in the following:
- Unique page views
- Average time on site
- Number of Sessions per User
- Goal conversions
- Reduced bounce rate
In addition to these statistical results, the user experience was enhanced throughout the site by seamlessly connecting project case studies with the specific products used in these projects. Adventure+ is able to easily connect and powerfully visually display the specific products used in each of its feature case studies through the website CMS. This allows the different customer groups to easily select the products it is interested in and add them to an enquiry submission.
Similarly, the display of products also dynamically integrates (via content tagging) related products as well as detailed product specifications, including the ability to download product brochure and information packs, as well as DWG drawings for architects and town planners who are in the design process and wish to incorporate adventure+ products directly into their designs.
Digital - Corporate
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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