Watadoo – Website
Created at Kaboom communication design in 2017 with WordPress
This project consisted in a complete revamp of Watadoo, a website aiming to be the reference for events and activities in Ottawa-Gatineau and wishing to extend its reach to other areas all over Canada. The client wished for an easier event publishing process and, mostly, wanted to improve user experience, in order to drive more people to the website.
My Role for this Project
- UX design
- Development planning and management
- Web development
- Search engine optimisation (SEO)
The Results
- Over 1000 visits per month
- Around 90% of visits by new visitors
- Around 80% of visits coming from organic search results
UX Design
A number of factors were going to influence the user experience design of this website, the main one being that it is first and foremost a directory, meaning that research through a list of events was going to take centre stage.
Having little to no data to work with early on and no time to conduct adequate user research, the experiential design rapidly gravitated toward the following assumption: the average user would want to look for events taking place in a specific location (an area, or region, in this case) in the near future (changes would be made along the way to allow users to search by date at launch).
As events were to be added manually by the client, it was expected that a certain level of quality would be met regarding event images. Single event pages and event listings would benefit from good-quality images. A card-based layout was privileged, in order to make Watadoo stand out compared to its competitors, who mainly used text-based event listings.
Nice images as well as a simple and efficient search-based navigation, devoid of superfluous elements as was orinigally the case, were to contribute to multi-page visits on the site, making visitors more exposed to advertising, the financial force driving the existence of this website.
Watadoo would thus grow and retain its client base, enticing customers to subscribe to alerts, eventually allowing the b2c relationship to endure outside of the website‘s realm with an ever-growing list of users.
All of the above was taken into consideration while elaborating the wireframes which acted as models for the user interface design and development of this website.
Development Planning and Management
- Development of the structure of content types
- Planning of interactions (user-interface and content-type-to-content-type relations)
- Planning of functionalities
- Supervision of development (identification of tasks, identification of milestones and quality control)
Web Development
- Development and programming of user event creation form (adaptation of compatibility between the Gravity Forms and Events Maker plugins)
- Development of custom variables for using with the Yoast SEO plugin (see below) by manipulating data via PHP functions
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Writing of title and meta description templates for events and event categories
- Writing of URL templates for events and event categories