The goals were to get the website for the commissioner and facilitate their marketing through it. The goal of the commissioner is to get the website to market their company and thus develop their marketing.
The products
Zuri Tours & Safaris has a main goal of providing reliable and safe experiences for tourists. With Zuri Tours & Safaris, customers can choose from three different itineraries, from four-night to seven-night trips.
Market in Africa and in Tanzania
The prices of the Safaris are not informed on the website, because there can be many different variations of the trips. The size should be put into perspective depending on the amount of pictures and their importance. That is why it is the fast way to communicate and the commissioner's orders come to me quickly.
Increasing visibility is one of the main goals, but it is not directly related to the planning of the website. The image below shows what kind of structure is on each page of the website. At the top of each page is the title indicating the location.
There are also many small but very important parts in the content of the website. Everything is planned as a "safari", the colors match and the pictures are all from Zuri Tours & Safaris. All images on the website were taken by Zuri Tours & Safaris employees or their friends.
The photos of the employees are there to gain some trust and to make the website more personal.
The ways in competition
Marketing via website
The first and most important thing when you start planning a website is to specify the theme of the website. After defining the website's theme and purpose, it's time to familiarize yourself with the audience.
Layout
Content is what will be included on the website; any data to be used. Visuals are about the details of the website, making it look nice, clear and whatever it is supposed to communicate to the visitor. To start planning the layout, it is important to make a draft on paper.
Website design aims to solve problems and this happens through a good layout, not the small details. It is much easier to predict the problems in this point while setting up the paper than after it is online.
Usability and navigation
Content
Texts
Visuality
Colours
Colors are a big part of the visual and basically all other elements are based on the choice of colors. It doesn't always have to be just lines, fonts, and boxes to separate different parts; colors can be a creative, beautiful and clear way to do that. The colors must be chosen carefully and a color wheel is a good help.
Only when planning the colors must it be taken into account that all parts must be thought of. The message and the subject must be defined in this point so that the colors can be used to highlight the impression and feeling as desired. When choosing the support colors, there should be enough contrast, especially in fonts.
Fonts
Those colors can be those next to each other in the circle or complementary colors.
Pictures
When creating a website, images can be selected in such a way that the right message is sent. Images are also an opportunity to connect with visitors, find commonalities and make people think they are on the same wavelength. Having the wrong number of images in the wrong places can cause huge problems for visitors.
The images should be there to support the text and not draw all the attention. There are free and paid websites where the photos can be freely selected and used. It's also one of the quickest ways to make an impact and it's very personal and can be done very interestingly.
Selecting the tools
Wix
There are nine offices in five countries: two in Israel, three in the USA, two in Brazil, one in Lithuania and one in Ukraine. After creating the website of Zuri Tours & Safaris it is easy to agree with the promises that the introductions of Wix. The site was really easy to use and even though I didn't even know about it before I was able to start editing the site as soon as I signed up.
When planning the different language pages, the instructions were really easy to follow and the action was broken down into very small steps. Also the commissioner's contact person had to ask Wix a question and the response was immediate and clear. Wix was a right choice and creating the website and editing afterwards became easy for a user.
Communication with the commissioner
The freedom was also obvious and there were no restrictions in editing the layout, setting the pictures and creating text. Normally we exchanged thoughts and messages a few times a week, but in the most active times even many times a day. This of course created problems as we all had different schedules, especially the commissioner in Tanzania.
Sometimes we had to wait days for answers and since some questions were quite critical and important, the website always stopped during this time. This delayed many things as the commissioner was unable to check progress on the website, submit materials or provide comments. Despite the difficulties, the communication was quite well organized and since the contact person and I were well acquainted with working in a multicultural environment, the challenges were expected.
Benchmarking
Compared to the Roy Safaris website, the little things were in place: the menu was at the top of the page, always in the same place, and the logo always went to the home page. The only flaw on the Good Earth Tours & Safaris website that drew attention was the gallery. In addition, most of the things to learn were quite positive on the Good Earth Tours & Safaris website.
Website planning for Zuri Tours & Safaris started with defining the purpose, target audience, product to be sold and theme. The website comes online for those who want information and need to be tempted to purchase certain services. Also the website is there to give a chance to contact the staff and book a trip.
Layout
Once the basic client was specified, the goal and purpose of creating a website had to be defined. Of course it should be clear, but nowadays other channels are more suitable to spread the information. The other channels must be active on sharing the address to the website because they already have followers.
Those who come to the website must be convinced that they want that company to operate their trip and that there is no better option. Since the background photos are a big part of the look of the website, it took a lot of time to plan. Since the main way to achieve the goal of the website is to create a need and a want to experience Tanzanian wildlife, the photos are one of the most effective ways.
Usability and navigation
The banner has the same image and clicking on it will take you back to the home page. This way it is easy to find, but also because search engines have to repeat. The headings are really clearly planned and try to get into a format that tells exactly what is on each page.
Still in this case we decided to make many pages because the topics are very clear and otherwise the pages would have had too much text and they would have become very cluttered. Because all the services have their own pages, the search engine seemed unnecessary. All the things are at least three clicks away and the pages are really clear.
Content
Texts
In this way, the image of the company gains trust and in this case it is also evidence that the personnel know English and can serve in English. The texts on this website were written by staff in Tanzania, then Pulli read it and I also went through everything before adding anything to the website. The words had to be chosen so that they were really marketable, but still familiar to anyone.
As mentioned earlier, the plan was to make the headlines really stand out and get the whole point across in one or two words on each page. The sections have been made with images and the Contact Us page itself has a text box where all the most important information is. They tried to always get the detailed information about the trips in PDF files, so that they are not out of date, but still really available and easy to print out if needed.
Visuality
Colours
That is why the texts tried to be kept simple and not too colorful. All the colors in the background are similar to the earth, all the pictures are scenes from Tanzania, and so the colors came almost automatically. The background of the texts is translucent white, which calms the colors, makes it easier to read and gives more integrity to the pages.
Many of the safari images have the main color blue and as it is such a calming color it was chosen. It is also a good color to be in the background as it is not too bright and distracting.
Pictures
We got an understanding of what schedule we're trying to meet and planned for the website to be ready to be published in the summer. All these things really need to be strictly planned for the entire website to work. The importance of notes especially for me gained a new perspective because the commissioner was not always available and I had to write down all the matters discussed.
Writing down the important things in the most visible place possible also became an important thing. Because the Zuri Tours & Safaris website had many pages, hyperlinks became an important factor in navigating. That is very practical to learn, because normally even the smallest company uses many channels and they can be easily linked.
