If you haven’t experienced Somerset, you should.

The Local Tourism Organisation is part of Somerset Regional Council, just a skip and a jump northwest of Brisbane.

As you leave Brisbane’s suburbs and the hills start to undulate, the grass seems a little greener and the air a little cleaner. Soon, you’re met by cute villages with cracking bakeries, fantastic country pubs and expansive waterways that make up some of the best regional fishing, camping, boating and adventure spots you’ll come across in Queensland’s southeast.

Sounds enticing, hey? Well that was the mission – create a tourism website for Experience Somerset that showed people just how beautiful, fun, romantic, tasty and adventurous the Somerset region can be.

Inspiring visitors, delivering for tourism products

Experience Somerset’s existing website was dated, and while it could tell you a lot about the region it didn’t show just what a special experience Somerset’s beautiful array of towns and tourism products could deliver for visitors.

Guided by the marketing team at Somerset Regional Council, Experience Somerset is now a content-rich portal packed with everything a visitor to the area could want to know and experience.

We started with a comprehensive scoping session to map out a new information architecture that would feel natural to anyone browsing the site. Experiences, Stays, Tastes and Events took centre stage, with pages and product listings folding through them to ensure visitors weren’t just inspired, but also deeply informed.

The Content Division’s team of designers went about wire-framing key pages to ensure function fit the form, and to provide an in-depth prototype for the Somerset team to ponder and approve. Because the team is always adding new products and content, this meant building an easy-to-use backend for the team at Somerset Regional Council to keep listings and event content fresh.

Yes, a good internal user experience is vital, but the visitor experience is where dream holidays are made. After the wireframing phase our designers went about extrapolating the eye-catching colour palette for Experience Somerset into a user interface design that puts website visitors into a sunset rising over the mountains and valleys, and invites them to find themselves in Somerset.

Beautiful photography is complemented by motion graphics that grow into the screen, pulling the user down towards row after row of featured content. Urging them to visit. Urging them to experience. Urging them to taste the local produce. Inspiring them to book now.

Inspiring a great escape

Developing in WordPress, our team went about bringing the design and user experience to life. Over a three-week development period, design, functionality development and testing ensured Experience Somerset were delivered a light-weight, fast and content-rich website ready to greet visitors with open arms.

And because we’re The Content Division, we ensured the website’s blog area was stocked with the exact articles our experienced team of destination marketers know shift the dial for regions.

Built to inspire visitors, built to facilitate conversion for local tourism operators, and built to power search – Experience Somerset is not unlike the region itself. A wonder to behold.

Now crack a coldie, sit back, and watch the sunset over Lake Somerset as the waters lap at the shore. It’s like you’re already there.