Growing the visitor economy & attracting inward investment

Two websites, one CMS

The Visit Harrogate website had an established audience when the client came to us and broadly the brief was to protect and add to the audience and search authority the site already had. The Events Harrogate website was a brand-new site, identify its shortcomings and look for opportunities to increase visibility and attract new audiences. We had data to work with and used this to inform our thinking in conjunction with the client brief.

The Events Harrogate website was brand new site, with no established audience or ranking in search engines. We configured the DC Conference Venue Search module to provide the functionality required around venue searching and built a shortlist and enquiry feature which allowed users to create a shortlist of venues and send a single enquiry to multiple venues - with all the data being tracked in the background.

To avoid duplication of data and efficiency of use, both sites run from one centralised CMS, and our DC Conference Venue module provides a set of fields in the CMS which can be populated to drive the content on the frontend of the Events Harrogate website for any business providing venue facilities - meaning 'one business record' in the CMS serving multiple uses and avoiding bloat in the system.

Driving user engagement to aid visitor conversion

Without alienating the current 45+ audience the Harrogate team were keen to increase engagement with younger audiences. Our industry knowledge informed us that to do this we needed to drive more personalised experiences, giving each niche audience initiative, fast and easy access to content which meet their own specific requirements. We introduced several different content discovery tools to achieve this.

Using the DC Global Categories module, which groups together content from across the site into thematic interests, users can quickly get to all content related to a particular theme including businesses, events, blogs, and itineraries.

By adding the DC Location Categories module we’ve been able to create landing pages of each of the key locations across Harrogate to showcase the businesses, events, offers, blogs, and itineraries. Not only has this made it easy for users to see what is on offer in each location it also provides target pages for search traffic related to these locations.

The introduction of the DC Itinerary Entry Type feature provides users with a searchable database of pre-built itineraries to help inspire their visit. Itineraries can be filtered by thematic interest and by location as well as ordered alphabetically or by most recently added.

A password protected members login portal, and publically accessible events submission

Harrogate has over 500+ members and partners across its Visit and Events sites. Many have multiple businesses, and several have listings which span both sites. There is only small marketing team with responsibility for the website. So, adding the DC Business Login module as part of their package was an easy decision to make for Harrogate.

Each member has their own login which provides access to make content submissions for the website, with all content passing through a strict moderation and sign off process by the Visit Harrogate team before being published on the website.

The importance of events to the Harrogate region is well established, and the client wanted to ensure the site has the most comprehensive listings listing possible. So, in addition to the DC Business Login they added the publicly accessible DC Events Submission module to their package so that event providers who are not members can submit events for inclusion on the website. Again, all held in moderation for approval before being published on the website.