Website

Project Overview

Sydney.com is one of- if not the most visited tourism websites in Australia. Containing tens of thousands of pages with video, accomodation and a booking engine - it is a crucial tool for tourists and locals.

Organisation

Global Mobile Pty Ltd

Team

Athan Papoulias - CEO and lead strategist
Joe Barber - CEO of Modapt Pty Ltd

Project Brief

Imagine coming to a vibrant foreign city, not any city, one of the worlds most excited and colourful cities - Sydney. Or perhaps you are from Brisbane and it's your first time in Sydney. But when you land and hop off the plane you don't know where to go, or what to do...or how to find out more information....That was the essence of the brief. Now the solution... (Queue the superman music) Then you are drawn to free Wi-Fi at the airport and 'BAM' Sydney.com lands your screen(hang on I doubt Sydney Airport has free anything, anyway you get the picture). No matter your phone type you have, in fact we have catered to 20,000 phone types, and no matter your screen size or speed - we have the ultimate destination with rich content and a booking engine to allow you to book anywhere anytime. Sydney.com was mobilized by www.global-mobile.com.au to place Sydney in the palm of anyone's hands anytime. Not just a tool to find things around you, a necessity when it comes to attractions, landmarks, booking accommodation and what's on.

Project Innovation / Need

The patent technology we use is called Modapt. This taps into an extensive handset library of almost 20,000 handset profiles dating some 10years back(the most globally). This ensures each user has a custom (ultimate) experience based on the handset and connection type - no other platform does this. We have step away from industry standard of 'one size fits all' and using resolution to allow a one site to fit all for screens(a crude slow way)
We also use server side rendering in connection with the world's fastest most secure cloud platform eC2(Amazon platform used by eBay and Google. This means unlike a 'one size fits all' which our competitors provide, our clients users get the best experience at the time. We also rely on our platform (not the users mobile like competitors) to achieve fast downloads. This is all delivered by our custom CDN(content delivery network) which there are 10 or less globally available. The clients website has some 100k + pages which had to be optimized including deep linking for mobile SEO and automation with their booking engine. The home page boasts a real time slider of Sydney's best locations. The project was built in 8 weeks and is an amazing mobile achievement.

User Experience

The user experience was key. Countless hours and testing went into user habits when using sites on the go. These included eye tracking habits, menu size and location and steps to make a booking. Key deliverables are measured by a user test group prior to launch. After which ongoing analysis and changes are made. Sydney.com is always a work in progress and always will be for global-mobile.com.au. The most crucial exercise was not on producing a mobile website which stimulates just the eyes & does nothing else but in fact a highly function msite which only gives the user what they need and strips the site of everything else. Integration with 3rd parties such as our data warehouse and booking engine meant we had to customize each experience to allow for a seamless transition. when accessing a tourism site on the go its key data transfer is at its lowest yet you receive a ultimate experience first time - everytime.

Project Marketing

The marketing plan is quite extensive as it flows from the department of tourism. This includes an announcement from the Minister of tourism, hundreds of thousands of dollars on SEM and huge spend across all agencies for outdoor and mass media. The goal is to educate locals and travellers that you can have Sydney in the palm of your hand, find what you want, when you want and even book accommodation.