The client
VisitBritain is the national tourism agency that sells Britain to the world. Selling a country is not a one-website job. It takes a network of localised sites for different countries, languages and scripts, all hanging off a common spine so the brand reads the same in Seoul as it does in São Paulo.
NetDecisions, the firm that became Agilisys, won the VisitBritain redevelopment in what the trade press of the time called one of the most lucrative new-media contracts of the year: a deal worth around £500,000. The British Tourist Authority chose us from a field of 320 agencies that responded to its brief, invited twelve to tender, and shortlisted four for the final selection: JKD, Wheel, the incumbent Euro RSCG Circle, and NetDecisions. The timing mattered too. The BTA was rebranding to VisitBritain following its merger with the English Tourism Council, so this was the first digital expression of a brand new national identity. We built the technical background and the core framework for all of VisitBritain's sites, including the global versions, with Jonathan as the lead designer on the content management strategy and the internationalisation templates.
The challenge
The BTA was running around forty sites promoting Britain abroad, and wanted them overhauled and pushed into new markets, including China, Poland, Russia and South Korea. It had invested heavily in new back-end systems, a Tridion content management system and Autonomy search, and needed a design and build that could make those investments pay. Online travel brochures, holiday and itinerary planners, and increased personalisation were all on the brief. The real problem was never a page. It was a system: templates and a content model robust enough to carry dozens of languages and writing directions, including right-to-left scripts, power all of those features, and keep scaling as personalisation grew, all from one core framework.
What we did
We designed the content management strategy and the internationalisation templates for the entire VisitBritain network: the template system and content structure that let a single core framework drive around forty localised sites across countries and languages. Everything integrated with the client's Tridion CMS and Autonomy search, and everything supported right-to-left and bidirectional text as first-class citizens, not afterthoughts.
Our approach
Design the system once so it localises cleanly everywhere. We built the templates and content model for translation and for different scripts from day one, rather than shipping a single English site and retrofitting it market by market, and we built it all to work hand in glove with the back-end platforms the client had already chosen.
Outcome
The initial build of VisitBritain's global localisation network: a content framework and template system designed to scale across around forty markets and languages, and to seed new sites in markets such as China, Poland, Russia and South Korea. Phillip Smith, VisitBritain project manager at the British Tourist Authority, described why the work was awarded to us:
// Client quote
“This is a very big project for the BTA. It’s also one of the biggest contracts out there in the agency market at the moment. We’ve invested heavily in new back-end systems, including Tridion and Autonomy, and we needed an agency that could help us best integrate them with our web applications.”
All four shortlisted agencies could have delivered the job. The work went to NetDecisions because we offered the most interesting proposal, bringing added extras to the table the others did not.
Awards & recognition
The VisitBritain website was recognised internationally during the period of this work. At the World Travel Awards, VisitBritain was named World's Leading Tourism Authority Website across the mid-2000s, the years spanning the build.
Later VisitBritain.com honours, including a 2010 Web Marketing Association WebAward and a 2011 Webby Awards honoree listing, relate to a subsequent redesign rather than this initial build, so we do not claim them here.
Context & coverage
VisitBritain was a brand new organisation when we did this work. It was created on 1 April 2003 from the merger of the British Tourist Authority and the English Tourism Council, with a remit to market Britain to the world and develop the visitor economy at home. Our work was the initial build of its global, localised web presence under a single new identity, a formative moment rather than a routine refresh.
- VisitBritain (Wikipedia) and VisitBritain: our history: formation in April 2003 from the BTA and English Tourism Council merger.
