Website and mobile app to market the Scottish Highlands to potential visitors.

Background

NB Communication has acted as digital partners for Highlands-based destination marketing group Venture North since 2014.

Venture North, founded in 2012, is a membership organisation promoting tourism in Caithness and Sutherland. The group needed an attractive and accessible online platform to provide tourist information and to increase the visibility of the area.

Challenge

The client initially got in touch about the design and development of a detailed website which would feature a huge amount of information useful to anyone with an interest or plan to visit the area. We developed a brand new site incorporating fully responsive design, and offering a range of functionality to help users find the information they require quickly and easily.

Solution

The site includes a database of accommodation, restaurants and bars, visitor attractions, tour operators and local shopping. (There is potential to add more categories as the site grows). The database can be searched in various ways, including from the bottom of the pages for each area, offering listings specific to that region.

Results

The Venture North site launched in February 2015 and by the end of its first quarter, it had seen a 300% increase in traffic, with visitors spending an average of 5 minutes browsing the site, well above the average of a typical website. Following the successful launch of the Venture North website, further additions followed later in 2015, as NB designed and built an additional section of the website dedicated to the Taste North festival, which promotes the high quality food and drink produce of the Highlands region. In 2016, NB were again approached by Venture North, this time with the view to developing a mobile app to compliment the information found on the website. The Venture North Heritage App was launched in autumn 2016 and is a handy map-based app allowing visitors to the region to identify tourist attractions and points of interest in their close proximity. It pulls in data from the Venture North website to present visitors with all the information they need to find out about the sights and attractions around them.