Websites for Tourism NGO
365 Association is a local Non-Governmental Organisation in the sector of tourism, culture, and education. Their biggest projects are called Free Sofia Tour and Free Plovdiv Tour. They also stand behind numerous touristic services, such as the Culture, Communist and Alternative Tours. Also, the Red Flat Museum and #LOVESOFIA – a theater play in English.
Opportunity for the association
The association was on the verge of a big rise in the tourism sector. Companies such as Wizz Air and Ryan Air started flying regularly to Sofia. This meant a great deal to their team. This opened an opportunity to meet many more tourists in Sofia and Plovdiv on a daily basis. On the other side, their team was still rather small and operated on the principle of voluntary work mostly. Therefore they did not have a lot of resources to invest in their online presence. However, they wanted to step up their online outlook and decided to invest in redesigning their websites. The three websites were 365 Association, Free Sofia Tour, and Free Plovdiv Tour.
The problem
The webpages were very outdated. All of them were written on custom code and were not easily accessible for them. The new website would have allowed them to make internal changes and update the information about their services. The main priority of the project, therefore, was redesigning the three websites. WordPress was a great option. It would have given them easy access to the control panel. Implementing ways of booking services online and structuring the internal information presented there in a better, more user-friendly way.
Challenges
Their websites were already using pretty old domains and were scoring very high in google on different searches. They definitely wanted to preserve that, but also make the pages more modern, presentable and user-friendly. Another thing was the implementation of online booking systems, so their customers can book and pay their tours online. The last challenge was to turn the pages into a good structured online portal for information.
Results
Overall the websites started performing much better, loaded much faster, scored even higher in google depending on keyword searches. As a result, they nearly tripled the size of their monthly visitors. Thanks to the booking forms they managed to present and sell their services to many new customers, who were overall impressed with their online and offline presence.
The personal approach, the willingness to help organizations in the non-governmental sector, that have an ideal goal and to adapt their prices to the occasion, without affecting the quality of their work.
– Tomislav Rashkov, Vice President
Free Sofia Tour and Free Plovdiv Tour
Free Sofia Tour and Free Plovdiv Tour are the most visited websites of the association. They have thousands of users per month and have a very high percentage of organic search traffic. The websites are constantly being updated and improved in functionality and user interface.
Read how together with a library we created a site for Web Development for a Historical Library – Time Travel Map using PHP and Laravel.