Revolutionizing Travel: DuVine's Award-Winning Website Redesign by Tank Design

Immersive Imagery and Intuitive Navigation Elevate the User Experience in Luxury Travel

Tank Design drew inspiration from DuVine's target customer - an avid traveler seeking unique experiences beyond typical tourist attractions. The primary navigation of the site highlights popular regions like France and Italy while showcasing the breadth of tour offerings. The redesign also ensures that branded tours resonate with users by providing descriptive text within the primary navigation.

What sets DuVine's website apart is its intuitive navigation and distinct communication. The design delights users with its sophisticated brand representation and inspires wanderlust with the possibilities offered for international cycling and adventure tours. The site manages to accommodate an incredible amount of information in a design system that feels manageable for a user.

The realization of the design involved extensive research, including interviews with customers, staff, and tour guides, to understand their needs and expectations from both a tour and an online booking perspective. This data was used to shape overarching themes that served as design guidelines. The site is built in WordPress, with a custom-built, responsive theme and uses the Advanced Custom Fields module for a more intuitive experience for the site’s content editors.

One of the main challenges in the redesign was capturing the intangible quality of local experiences online that resonate with DuVine’s target customer. This was solved with immersive imagery layouts, personalization through the “Find a Tour” tool, and small nods to the experience like “Eat” & “Drink” in every tour overview. The result is a website that has driven four times as many bookings compared to the old site, a 65% increase in visits from mobile devices, and a 20% increase in traffic from organic search. Sales are up 40% year over year, a lift fully attributed to the work done on the DuVine site by Tank.

The DuVine website redesign project kicked off in December of 2016 and has since continued with ongoing site optimization based on stakeholder and user feedback. The Tank Design team, including Brandon Washington, Amanda Saulino, John Hemminger, Laurel Marcus, Nick Braica, Libby Safford, and Megan Riley, have been instrumental in the success of this project.

The redesign of DuVine's website by Tank Design is a testament to the power of intuitive design and sophisticated branding in enhancing user experience. It is a deserving winner of the Iron A' Design Award, respected for integrating industry best practices and competent technical characteristics, and contributing to a better world.