Image Credit : Photography by Peter Casamento and David Johns.
Special thanks to Parks Victoria and Bureau of Meteorology.
Project Overview
The Balloon Flights Over Melbourne is a breathtaking marriage of technology, accessibility, design, social media and SEO.
Project Commissioner
Balloon Flights Over Melbourne
Project Creator
Team
Creative Direction & Project Management: Brad Smith
Design: Nathan Davis & Brad Smith
Front-end Development: Nathan Davis & Christian Klammer
Back-end Development: Nick Marfleet
SEO: Kath Cashion & Romela de Leon
Project Brief
Together with Balloonman, we developed the brief to build a connected world of technology, commerce and social media gives flight to beautiful images and a seamless booking process.
Live weather feeds, dynamic photo galleries, responsive site design, integrated flight data incl. flight path and altitude, mapping, social media and time-lapse video.
Project Need
Being a small business without big advertising budgets, the idea was to leverage customers and their flying experience for advocacy across social media.
Every flight is documented and shared with customers via a private web page loaded with pics, data and video as well as easy-access share buttons. Details include:
Altitude and flight path are captured using the Strava's mobile App which is uploaded into the site's private flight page.
A remote boom camera shoots a team photo looking back to the basket during flight and support crew shoot a team photo at dawn during inflation and take-off.
A basket mounted GoPro captures a time-lapse video of each flight from take-off to landing.
All flight details are shared with customers via an HTML email linking to the private flight portal for them to share socially.
Additionally, and built into the site are image galleries that tweet, show/hide content functions to view background images, parallax flight package transitions
Design Challenge
Hot air ballooning is highly competitive within Search Engine Optimisation. Inversely, photography is really the only means showing the experience of ballooning. Our design challenge was to deliver an image rich site with high search rank, simple booking functions and accessibility across mobile, desktop and tablet.
The full feature set:
+ Accessibility on mobile, tablet and desktop devices
+ Powerful SEO balanced with breath-taking imagery
+ Personalised flight data pages including video, flight path and altitude metrics
+ Live weather feed
+ Flight packages seamlessly link to booking forms
+ Rich social media integration
+ Breath-taking galleries
+ eMail marketing
Sustainability
No balloons were popped in the making of this website.
Digital Experience - Website
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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