A trip to increased siteseeing.

BudgetTravel.com is a website that provides consumers with practical articles and tips for saving money on travel. When we began working with them, their content was poorly organized. The site was also cluttered with ads causing users to become frustrated and exit the site. We knew we needed to rethink how Budget Travel presented content altogether. We kept our goals focused—lighten the load for editors in the CMS and design a site that retained readers.

Our challenge was to create a simple user experience that made users happy while importing years of content and keeping valuable URL strings intact. We iterated and landed on a limited set of categories that, when tested, satisfied the project goals. We designed user experience flows and user interface components, such as intuitive navigation, thumbnail types and sharing features, that would build the pages of the site.

We anticipated an overwhelming amount of old referral traffic that would enter the site and land on a 404 page, so in addition to creating a clean, easy-to-use site, we took advantage of search data retrieved using Algolia to provide relevant content to these users. Algolia also allowed us to create other algorithms to enhance the search experience and immediately provide users with relevant content.

The results were visible and measurable. Unique visits and page views both increased as did referrals from social media. We removed barriers for users and continued to generate revenue for Budget Travel by being selective and thoughtful with on-site advertising.