Simply Diving
After acquiring the Simply Diving business and accompanying website, its owners soon realised they were sitting on a potential goldmine – if only they could get more customers to visit the site and a higher percentage of them booking courses.
Simplified
The existing Simply Diving site had been well maintained and kept up-to-date, but like many older sites, it was suffering from accumulating pages, features and content that had been added on over the years.
My first task was to sit down with the owners and sift through the content on the site (given that they are in southern Spain, Skype made the process a whole lot easier!). It quickly became apparent that the site was huge and unweildy. There were various language versions, stand-alone microsites, a non-functioning shop and – by looking at the directory structure – many pages that didn’t seem to be linked in anywhere.
Fortunately, because the client was new to owning the business, they weren’t emotionally attached to the content that had built up over the years. This made the process of weeding it out much easier.
After conducting the content inventry, we discussed the sitemap I had sketched out and looked at the booking process. The existing payment solution offered by PayPal had been working well so at this stage we opted to leave it as it was. Sometimes, if it ain’t broken it doesn’t need fixing!
As you might expect, the homepage received a significant amount of attention. Large Calls-to-Action feature on the left and lower down the page in the main column, taking visitors straight to the most important content. In the main they replicate the primary navigation but offer a richer experience, with images supporting the content of the link destination.
Elsewhere on the site, the focus was on simplicity – reflecting the name of the company and the brand direction. The About Us page offers the visitor a chance to meet the staff of Simply diving and gives the site a more personal feel – so important when asking customers to make online reservations.
So with a range of updates planned for the future, how does the owner of Simply Diving feel the redesign has gone so far? I’ll let him tell you himself:
Tim helped us update a large sprawling website that lacked focus, into a structured, accessible and friendly place for our customers to find out about Simply Diving.
The information is presented clearly, the website is easy to navigate and visitors find what they need to know without too much trawling. We’ve noticed (via Google Analytics that Tim installed for us) that potential clients are hitting exactly the pages we want them to see, they are reading about where they can dive and what they can learn and then are going straight to our most important page: reservations!
The site appears more trustworthy and therefore potential clients are far more at ease paying in advance. Again, this is testament to the site’s general and overall professional appearance. In fact we’re often told that the website was the main reason they came to us!
Simon Bell, owner Simply Diving Spain