YLC – Tour Company

On Thursday 17th August 2017, Pamela March reached out to us via the contact form on our website. In her message, she wrote: "I have been aware of your services and associates I know who have your web design. ...I am interested to talk to you about making changes on my current websites for better internet exposure. ...I look forward to your feedback. I am realistic in hearing your comments as I know there is still much I can change."

Alla responded to Pamela later that day and arrangements were made for a meeting the very next day. Based on the content of the correspondence, there was never any intention to offer to do a new website. The purpose of the meeting was simply to provide feedback and to offer suggestions for improvement. A fact that Alla made clear early on during the scheduled meeting, saying to the effect: "I'm NOT here to sign you up. I'm just here to take a look at what you do and give you some advice."

Together, Alla and Pamela went through various pages on her current website, https://YourLocalChauffeur.co.nz, sharing suggestions about things that Pamela coud do herself or get her current webmaster to do for her.

Then Pamela wanted to know more about what we do for our clients, in particular what we have done for other tour companies. So, Alla showed Pamela examples of tour websites we've done. Based on the questions being asked, Alla went through other pages of our website explaining the concept of our Marketing Websites, their features and their cost.

Alla clearly explained to Pamela that we ONLY build WordPress websites and that we host our websites on Amazon servers. The Amazon servers we use are located in Sydney, Australia.

Towards the end of this 2 and a half hour meeting, Pamela concluded that she wanted iBeFound to re-do her website. Since Alla had another meeting scheduled in less than 20 minutes, Pamela asked Alla to call her after that meeting so that she could purchase one of our Marketing Website packages.

A couple hours later, Alla met back up with Pamela and per her request, got her signed up for a BASIC Biz Marketing Website. Pamela was clearly excited about her decision. Over the course of that weekend, we received a few emails from Pamela with her logo and other material related to her website project.

The image below is a screenshot taken of Pamela's website homepage just prior to starting on her website redesign project. Click the image to be taken to an archive of the website to see how it looked at that point in time.

Work began on the very Friday evening that Pamela purchased her BASIC Biz Marketing Website package. I (Dale) personally installed the WordPress account on our servers and went through our Theme Library of 600+ templates to find one appropriate to Pamela's business which I then installed on the WordPress account.

The following Monday, the project was assigned to one of our team members and he started on the first 3 phases that all our website projects go through. Among other things, this included:

• Configuring the WordPress settings
• Installing an SEO plugin and configuring its settings
• Installing a special plugin that helps with the SEO of uploaded images
• Creating a Privacy Policy page
• Creating a website Terms & Conditions page
• Creating a Gmail account - to access various Google services needed for the website
• Setting up a Google reCaptcha account - to add spam protection to the contact forms on the website
• Setting up a Google Maps API key - to be able to add a Google Map (if needed) to the website
• Setting up a Google Analytics account -  to be able to track web visitors later on
• Setting up a Google Tag Manager account - to make it easier to connect other services to the website
• Setting up a Google Search Console account - to be able to submit the website's sitemap to google and monitor website traffic

Once these first 3 phases were completed, we moved on to the customisation phase of this website redesign project. This involved doing a variety of things including:

• Reducing the number of pages that came with the template to correspond with the number needed for the type of website package. In this case we only needed 7 pages.
• Starting to move the content from Pamela's current website to the new one.
• Adjusting the layout of the template to one more appropriate for displaying Pamela's content in an easy-to-understand manner.
• Browsing YouTube and Vimeo for appropriate videos to add to the website.
• Browsing Pamela's TripAdvisor page to choose suitable reviews to add to the website's homepage.
• Trying to decipher and make sense of Pamela's various tours as written on her website and on her Rezdy pages.

Dealing with the content on Pamela's tour pages proved to be the most challenging part of this project as there was A LOT of info to go through. Based on our initial understanding of Pamela's tours, we determined they should be grouped on 4 tour pages. We came up with the following layout and began to move the tour content over to the appropriate tour pages.

At this point we were just copying and pasting the tour content over so that we could have all the related tours on the same page. Later on, I would personally examine the tours on each page to get a better sense of their similarities and their differences.

But first, it was time for Alla to meet with Pamela to show her the progress thus far. The first follow up meeting was arranged for Friday 15th September, 2017 - about 3 weeks after we began on this project. Prior to this first followup meeting, at least 20 hours of work had already been done on this project!

Following that first followup meeting, Pamela provided more info including a couple spreadsheets in an attempt to clarify her tours further. This helped a bit but there were still some things that were not yet clear.

So, starting with Pamela's Wine, Gourmet & Scenic Delight Tours, I (Dale) printed out related content from what was transferred over, what was on the corresponding Rezdy pages, and from other documents Pamela had sent us.

I spent MANY HOURS comparing the printed files with the spreadsheets trying to get a clearer understanding about these tours. Eventually, I decided to re-do one of the spreadsheets, adding extra columns with more details so that I could sort the info. This is what finally helped me to figure out the particulars of each tour.

Once I got past this point, I was finally able to come up with a more appropriate layout for the tour pages as shown below. This layout would allow a tour seeker to quickly compare Pamela's various tours which in turn would make it easier for them to make a buying decision.

We will NOT be monitoring the results of this website as it is NOT hosted with us and we have no control over what is happening on it since we migrated it on 2nd December, 2017.

UPDATE: 4th August, 2018
It has come to our attention that the website we created and launched in December 2017 has since been replaced.