Discover Greece Case Study interaction design

The Challenge

Marketing Greece, the official marketing stakeholder of the Confederation of Greek tourism Industries asked us to design and develop a showcase portal for Greece. The client’s digital strategy set three main goals for the new portal. 

1. To promote Greece as a world- class destination through
a complete showcase of Greece. 
2. To initiate digital sales through a central ticketing
service for accommodation, air and sea travel. 
3. To create a hub for all marketing campaigns initiated
in a variety of digital media channels and the social media. 

Discover Greece Case Study Digital Technology Discover Greece Case Study interactive platform

Challenge

Discovergreece.com is an interactive platform that constitutes a strategic pillar of Marketing Greece’s operation. The website showcases an integrated Greek Tourism Product portfolio acts as a sales tool by combining products with booking engines and serves as a digital platform for community building and social media campaigns. In particular, the platform offers a unique portray of Greek Tourism Product, providing comprehensive information for destinations, including highlights and secrets, allowing users to design their travel by using search features that bring together accommodation, transfer and sightseeing tours.


The Discovergreece.com aims at the increased promotion of the country and Greek tourism industry, allowing the user to easily search and find what he/she wants based on his/her search profile, through new ideas, experiences and “fresh” images. The ideal and desirable results are not only based on the technological system superiority, the creative – artistic depiction of strategy and specific objectives and on functionality researches, but also on the common vision of cooperatives.

 

Linakis Digital had to deal with the multiform character of Greece and the enormous size of information, using creativity and solutions – concepts, targeting and enhancing the repetitive visiting of the website. The “A Story a Day” project, for example, is an editional, that presents, each day, a different story of Greece. This section of the website operates and enhances the user to return and visit it again and participate (call to action), importing or collecting daily unique stories, experiences, thoughts and food tastes directly from Greece.

Furthermore, the pluralistic aesthetics and design have promoted the specific characteristics of our country, creating a unique mosaic of images, colors and ideas. The use of parallaxing (pictures and letters in motion at different speeds) has created a depth of field, giving the impression that you are in the landscape itself.

 

Solution

The Discovergreece.com has been developed on a Sitecore CMS platform – Linakis’ digital official partner – hosted in Microsoft Azure environment, providing significant advantages and impacts for both visitors (speed, personalized information), and manager (continuous market trends observation, visitor’s analysis). The complexity of information and the size of content were categorized according to Information Architecture design and a card sorting test, conducted by Linakis Digital to foreign visitors across Greece. Systems of international hotel and air tickets providers were integrated for the purposes of reservation. In details:

  • Unique creative design for Greece's official tourism portal which aims directly at upgrading the Greek touristic image abroad. The challenge here was to creative a portal with a substantial amount of information and functionality which would look anything but an informational portal.
  • In-person and online Information Architecture studies which helped identifying the best solution for the placement of information in the content tree and inside each template.
  • Development using Sitecore's best practices for engagement analytics, personalization and digital marketing readiness.
  • Web-service Integration with several 3rd-party content providers and services:
    - Hotels Combined > for online Hotel booking
    - Skyscanner > for air-ticket booking
    - Meteo.gr > for weather information across Greece
    - ElCulture > for events and cultural information
  • Hosting on 4 load-balanced front-facing servers on two different Microsoft Azure datacenters in Europe.
  • 100% X-HTML compatibility and SEO friendly development.

 

After several years of our website's successful online presence and having achieved 2 awards the website of DiscoverGreece.com has changed.