Projects / Tourism BC - Asian Regional Sites
Tourism BC’s (TBC) flagship site hellobc.com receives over a million site visits per month. The site was initially aimed at the North American market and is a rich source of travel information. TBC has marketing offices around the globe and is now starting to develop regional versions of the site. In Asia the regional marketing offices in Taiwan, China, Japan and Korea had already created a localized version of the site but had not stayed with the North American structure or strategy. The sites were stand alone versions with little in common with the corporate site apart from the name and subject matter.
Tourism BC would like to manage the content and the structure, and thus the strategic direction, of all of their sites centrally and are thus moving to a common content management system.
Tourism BC hired ADGi to create a master Asia information architecture, based on the North American IA that could then be used in whole or in part by the various regional sites.
Tourism BC had commissioned a market research firm to do research in each of the four countries to determine preferences and travel planning needs.
After reviewing the market research and existing site architectures for each of the four sites as well as the North America site, we determined that a comparative approach would be best where we compared:
- The Asia sites to each other
- Each of the Asia sites to what the user requirements were (based on the market research and available personas)
- The user needs to the North American IA
ADGi created several site maps visually showing the comparisons listed above. We then mapped the proposed new solution for each regional site as well as the master Asia IA. The result was an easy to understand rationale, clear identification of overlaps and gaps and quick acceptance by the many stakeholder groups of the solution.