The brief
The concept of the site was to provide discerning female travellers with an alternative to Lonely Planet and Tripadvisor which reflects their demographic and unique interests. The target audience are internet-savvy, confident women who like to gather well-informed opinion from people with similar interests.
Key project challenges:
- Allowing site visitors to navigate a huge volume of information about destinations worldwide in a variety of different ways without feeling lost, confused or overwhelmed
- As the site develops, content on new destinations may be initially sparse but destination pages needed to look great under all circumstances
- The design needed to be recognisably American without sacrificing global appeal
- Similarly, to reach its professional audience effectively the site needed to convey femininity without feeling teenage or kitsch, and without alienating potential male visitors
- For a start-up, we were building to a tight budget yet needed to deliver a site to compete successfully with household names with multi-million dollar funding and many times the resources
Identity's solution
Girls' Guide to the World launched in 2009 and has already attracted a loyal following. With consistent month-on-month growth in site visitors and advertising revenue despite a fluctuating economic climate, the site has generated widespread interest including coverage in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Business Week.
Building on this success we're currently working with Girls' Guide on new and exciting features which we look forward to telling you about soon.
Overall branding & design principles
We decided to develop mind-share for the site by focusing on the wealth of editorial content, and a creating a relaxed tone and approach which would both reflect the style of content and make the site enjoyable to browse for an audience accustomed to both social media and glossy magazines. All margins, padding and borders conformed to strict 'golden ratio' proportions which keep the site easy on the eye. Visual appeal and a high level of finish were essential for the site to attract a design-aware demographic.
We used a neutral colour palette of greys and dusky pink alongside American pastels to provide orientation and colour without detracting from the stand-out venue and destination images. The site employs a strong thematic colour scheme which provides users with a clear visual indicator of the continent they're on. Colour-coding all content throughout the site right down to venue level (such as bars and hotels) works visually and helps to keep users orientated at all times.
Navigation & structure
The homepage of Girls' Guide needs to help visitors who could be there for any reason - people who know where they want to go can use the search box or drill down though the continent and country structure to find destinations of their choice, while those who are seeking inspiration can use the random selection of destinations in the 'Where to go' content block. The 'What to love' area provides handy travel tips, destination and travel accessory reviews providing insights into travelling for the discerning female who wants to be in the know. Each content area acts as a 'funnel' or a 'shortcut' to a discrete section of the site.
Given the amount of information on each page, careful delineation of page areas through colour and structured content blocks was used to guide the eye down the page towards destinations and then to reviews.
A strict hierarchical structure was required to handle the large and disparate volume of information in a way that would be easy to navigate and contribute to the user's goals of easily planning holidays and conducting destination-specific research. To accommodate this, the main area of the site was built in ASP.NET MVC which maximises the site's flexibility and capacity for hierarchical organisation.
Destination pages
We organised destination-level content intuitively around the concepts of going and doing and providing local knowledge to a global audience. Doing revolved around the concept of activity types, including eat (restaurants), drink (bars) sleep (hotels), shop (recommended retail outlets), pamper (spa and other pampering experiences), and play (entertainment).
Design & branding considerations
Hand-drawn country maps marking destinations in their thematic colours contributes to the individualised and well-researched feel the site needed to convey. Icons grouped content into activity types such as 'shop' and 'sleep' and in consultation with our brand psychologist we again opted for a hand-drawn look which ties in with the country maps and logo and emphasises the personally tailored nature of the travel experience Girls' Guide offers.
Navigation & structure
The interactive street map of the area and venue reviews ordered by ranking highlights 'on the ground' local knowledge and allows visitors to find the best each destination has to offer, regardless of price. On the destination page, venue reviews are sorted first by those with photographs and then according to average user rating, and then randomised to ensure each page looks as good as possible, even where content is sparse.
Ad sales
Identity designed a hierarchical ad sales model which allows space to be sold at a global, continent, country and destination-specific levels. This creates unique opportunities for advertisers to pinpoint a specific demographic and location. Global brands can advertise to a large number of users while local brands can maximise return on investment. Advertisers on Girls' Guide can be confident of increased brand awareness and exposure to the people that matter.
Blog 
To accommodate the extensive interaction needed in this kind of site we made sure the ASP.net MVC site integrated seamlessly with .Blog, our enterprise blogging software. .Blog easily allowed users to share content on facebook and twitter, the social media platforms most used by the Girls' Guide demographic.
The blog allows for scheduled postings, allowing the site's constantly travelling site editors to prioritise their research without detriment to the regular site updates which encourage visitors to return frequently.
For comments, an "easy captcha" system is also in place, which uses a combination of scattered dots to confuse automated readers and larger, human-readable letters on a high-contrast background (for high legibility) to avoid many of the usual issues with anti-spam systems.
Inside knowledge
To encourage every site visitor to interact with the site, we lowered the bar by allowing first-time users to comment and create reviews without registering, with a later offer to register for automatic approval of subsequent reviews. This had the side-effect of nullifying the computer-generated spam which plagues so many review sites.