A joint project with Squiz.net using MySource Matrix
In the fourth quarter of 2005 Future Medium became involved in Tourism Tasmania's rollout of MySource Matrix powered websites for Discover Tasmania and TasTravel. The TasTravel site is an ecommerce front that acts for a chain of commercial travel centres across Australia.
TasTravel provides Tasmanian holiday information and booking services through the Tasmania Travel Centre's in Sydney and in Melbourne, as well as a consumer call centre in Launceston, Tasmania, and on-line booking services.
The new TasTravel site was released late in January 2006.
Branding Issues
The commencement of a new website release also coincided with a total re-brand of TasTravel. The new brand was created by Love in Sydney. Future Medium were awarded the website specification development, project management, interactive design, and supervision of the Matrix CMS implementation process. An e-commerce system was already in place (Webbook) and was scheduled for integration with the new Matrix-powered site.
Future Medium promptly took the reigns and developed a functional overview of the site. This specification took into consideration a range of business issues such as marketing campaign integration, e-booking experiences, and informative aspects.
Following discussions with Squiz.net about how the Matrix site would be tied to Webbook Future Medium produced a comprehensive specification.
The specification:
- Incorporated branding material from Love;
- Analysed use-cases;
- Referenced competition;
- Showcased conceptual material;
- Presented wireframe sketches of the proposed layout construction; and
- Identified areas for future growth.
Considering that the new brand was yet to be rolled out it was crucial that Future Medium carefully coordinate design concepts with TasTravel's marketing people to ensure that the new brand was neither diluted nor misrepresented.
E-Commerce Considerations
The original TasTravel site featured very little in the way of direct integration with the Webbook e-commerce system. This still remains a fundamental issue with the new site as the Webbook product has not been convenient to integrate. The complexities of utilising an external booking system were eventually overcome by Squiz. Essentially booking information has had to be maintained in multiple locations to facilitate a rich experience for site users.
The e-commerce aspects of the site had presented TasTravel with a range of problems in the past and this continued to be the focal point throughout our engagement. The former site did not present itself as an e-business. It presented itself as a text site with no conceivable functionality or market directive. From both technical and design perspectives Future Medium constantly focused on the reasoning behind the TasTravel site. In short, the TasTravel site acts as a shopfront for the discovertasmania.com website. The purpose of the discovertasmania.com site is to deliver Tasmania as a destination, an experience, and ultimately to create a 'brand' for those two aspects of the island state. TasTravel as a site must therefore act as a vehicle to make bookings for Tasmania experiences. To facilitate this in full the site will eventually need to be backwardly integrated into the discovertasmania.com site.
As a stand-alone entity the TasTravel site had to appear as an extension of Tourism Tasmania's marketing efforts whilst also being brutally clear that this is a shopfront. In comparison to the original site this meant a continual emphasis on book-able material on the home page and at almost every other level of the site. To carry off the experience and enhance the likelihood of capturing a sale it was also necessary to present booking information in a rich visual manner and in a format that could also be printed or emailed to a friend.
MySource Matrix CMS
Following a swift design process (which incorporated a number of in-house workshops with TasTravel's marketing and management personnel) the designs were packaged up in an implementation manual. Future Medium have worked closely with Squiz (the creator of the Matrix CMS product) since carrying out a number of local government projects together under the contract Squiz secured with the Tasmanian government. This close working relationship with Squiz has allowed Future Medium to develop a concise method of detailing implementation requirements for the Matrix product. As a direct result of this unique relationship between Squiz and Future Medium TasTravel were able to have their project completed to an extremely high standard in a tight time schedule.
Future Medium's design and management services have enabled TasTravel to achieve measurable results in usability, customer conversion, and site traffic.
To quote TasTravel's Manager, Maree Fox George,
"The website continues to grow at a rapid pace as our organisation finds new ways to work with it. "
