A comprehensive but dated Hawaiian travel site gets a modern makeover.
Break out your favorite Hawaiian shirt and toss a lei around your neck – we’re headed to Maui! Well, Maui.us, anyway. Unfortunately, when we found the three-year- old online travel guide, it was wilting faster than a week-old hibiscus. But don’t fret – we can revive this online travel site.
They say content is king, and I agree. If you want to garner a loyal audience, you need to present the content that audience is seeking (with frequent updates, I might add). Maui.us CEO John Bottomley said he spent thousands of hours building his site. With an interactive map, a comprehensive activity guide, a meticulous hotel directory and a slew of other exclusive features, Maui.us certainly has all the content it needs to become “the major travel gateway to the island of Maui” that Bottomley always dreamed it would be.
Still, Maui.us is hardly generating the new traffic, repeat visitations or conversions Bottomley anticipated when he launched the site in 2002. So while content may be king, let’s not forget to invite conversion design, his lovely and talented queen, to the luau. Conversion design is the process of designing to meet business objectives, such as converting traffic into sales.
The Problems
In order to live up to its potential, Maui.us needs to exude the authority, trust and credibility that people expect from a major travel gateway. The site must also instantly communicate its compelling offerings and make it crystal clear why visitors need them. Finally, to make the conversion design transformation complete, we need to place more emphasis on the site’s top moneymakers. Bottomley says that these are, in order of importance, the custom vacation builder, hotel bookings and the activities guide.
The bottom line is that Maui.us lacks visual appeal, which can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, according to a report published in the Behaviour & Information Technology journal. That suggests that Web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good impression. Keeping that in mind, here’s a list of shortcomings we can remedy to make those first 50 milliseconds really count.
Outdated appearance. The site’s outdated graphics and cliche island imagery leave users wondering whether the site is still active. Savvy travelers today are flooded with online options, and they refuse to waste their time on a site that might be outdated. Remember, they are looking for information and resources they weren’t able to find at the first five Maui sites they visited. We need to make visitors feel confident that Maui.us can provide the answers they need.
Inconsistent and cryptic site wide navigation. In our last two makeovers, we pointed out a common problem: too many items in the main navigation. While that is also an issue at Maui.us (count a whopping 12 items), the even bigger problem is inconsistent placement and appearance of the main navigation. On an 800 x 600 browser, you actually have to scroll down to see the nav. What’s more, the placement and arrangement of the links changes from page to page.
Then there are the cryptic icons; so cryptic that users “don’t think to click on them,” says Lisa Ramos, sales director for Sostre & Associates. (Ramos just happens to be planning a trip to Hawaii in a few months, making her exactly the audience that this site needs to woo.) “The icons just look like part of the design,” she notes. “At first, I thought the site only offered hotel and air search. That discouraged me from exploring the site further.”
Wide text columns. It’s hard enough to read text online. By taking your column of text and stretching it across the length of your Web page, you’re essentially guaranteeing that no one will read it. Just for fun, here are the numbers for some top information websites: MSNBC articles feature text columns that are 460 pixels wide, BBC articles post at 405 and Yahoo news stories come in at about 550. Compare that to Maui.us, which stretches its text columns to almost 700 pixels wide. As a general rule, the maximum width for columns of text should be around 500 pixels.
Poor use of photos. Occasionally you can get away with using poor images. I’ve even been known to discourage the use of gratuitous images in conversion design. But come on – we’re talking about Maui here. If there was ever a time to leverage photos and imagery, this is it. Images help to create an emotional response, and that’s what people want when they’re planning a Hawaiian vacation. After all, it’s not often that someone needs to make a trip to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so we must encourage the emotional desire to take the trip of a lifetime.
The Solutions
Now that we’ve identified the issues, let’s get to work. Our first step was to go to iStockphoto (www.iStockphoto.com). When you need great images, and you have a limited budget, this is the place to go. iStockphoto offers professional-quality photos and illustrations for ridiculously low prices (about $1 each for Web quality). A search for the term “Maui” yields 462 mostly professional images of the stunning Hawaiian isle. After downloading a few that didn’t work out, we settled on a relaxing scene from Big Beach, Maui.
Next, we whittled the navigation options down to five. We kept the links to the seven other items, but we worked them in toward the bottom of the page to reduce viewer confusion. Next, we placed the main navigation right at the top of the page, like most websites, so it wouldn’t jump around as users moved from page to page. Last but not least, we worked a little conversion design magic to give the site a more current look, while maintaining our focus on the big three income generators. After all, that’s what conversion design is all about.
When Bottomley submitted his site, his original goal was to “make a top-ranking site that MUST be as beautiful as the natural beauty of Maui itself!” Of course, meeting that challenge is surely impossible (have you ever been to Maui?), but I believe we’ve brought the site much closer with this new design. The real proof will come with the increased number of users that decide to use Maui.us for vacation planning.
Would you like to get a free home page or landing page design for your website and see it featured in this article? To be considered, please send your name, company, contact information (phone, email, etc.), a brief description of your business and its goals and, of course, your URL, to bydesign@sostreassoc.com. Please put “Revenue’s By Design Makeover” in the subject header.
PEDRO SOSTRE is principal and creative director at Sostre & Associates, a Miami-based consulting and development firm that also promotes affiliate programs on its network of websites, including Audio-BookDeals.com, EquestrianMag.com and iTravelMag.com. Sostre is currently working on a book about his concept of conversion design, scheduled for release in summer 2006. For more information, visit conversionpublishing.com.