Welcome to Travel

Introduction

Embarking on a journey I’d envisioned for years, I finally made the decision to live and work abroad in Australia in November 2022. Despite numerous reasons and excuses, I took the leap, meticulously planning every detail from securing my visa to booking a one-way flight set for March 14, 2023.

In anticipation of my Australian adventure, I eagerly signed up for Welcome to Travel‘s acclaimed Welcome to Melbourne tour. Even before setting foot in the Land Down Under, I proactively reached out to Welcome to Travel, expressing my expertise as a Visual Designer and my keen interest in enhancing their website. Fate intervened when Darryl, one of the co-founders, became my tour guide during Welcome Week. Through our encounter, a friendship blossomed, and I was offered a freelance opportunity to revamp their website design.

The Process

a project is only as good as the project management

I believe the only way a project is going to be successful is if you set it up for success. I pride myself on staying ultra organized and on top of my projects by using tools to help me. As a freelancer, I love using Bonsai to create contracts and invoices for my clients. Asana is my favourite project management tool – where I can create tasks, organize them into categories, assign due dates, and keep all task status’ and communication with my client in one place. I use Asana in conjunction with Harvest Time Tracker, so I can track every single minute of my time and know how long it takes me to do certain tasks, which helps me invoice the project properly and understand budget for future projects.

This project specifically went super smoothly because I took the time to really lay out exactly what pages we were going to be working on, what I needed to accomplish for each of them, and set a priority for each task at the beginning of the project. As we were working through design, Darryl and I would communicate via Google Chat and comments in Asana – assigning tasks back and forth when a task needed review or to be worked on.

The Process

working with the power of Elementor

Welcome to Travel already had a solid brand built out, so I was expected to work with and implement their brand guidelines to give the website a fresh look and feel. I did introduce a new beautiful sage green colour to use for link text and since the yellow they were using wasn’t accessible in this instance. The sage green integrates beautifully into their colour palette, and was used sparingly as an accent colour throughout the site. I also introduced some new font weights and styles using their current typefaces – just new ways of using their existing typography to bring new life into the brand and establish better text hierarchy.

The Welcome to Travel site is hosted on WordPress, using the incredibly powerful Elementor plugin. As a designer, Elementor is a joy to work with. It gives me the freedom to design pretty much anything I can imagine without code, but works exactly how code would. There weren’t many limitations I had to work with, but I wanted to keep the design as simple as I could while still making it beautiful and effective so Darryl can easily update the site himself without my help for years to come.

The Process

implementing modular design

Modular design, or modularity in design, is a design principle that subdivides a system into smaller parts called modules, which can be independently created, modified, replaced, or exchanged with other modules or between different systems.

I have found through my years of designing that this is one of the most important principles to think about and incorporate into my website design process. The goal is for everything to work as one cohesive system. I think about every section I design of a website as a “block” or “module”, that can be altered and reused for other parts of the site. Sometimes I’ll design a very specific or custom module that can only serve one purpose for a specific part of the site, but for the most part, I aim to create as many re-usable modules as possible so that my client has no limitations when it comes to expanding and updating their site in any way they can imagine.

For this website I created around 40 modules that can be modified, reused and rearranged to use anywhere on the site. This is enough to feel like you have a lot of layout options, but not too many where you feel overwhelmed and don’t even know which one to choose or where to start.

“Nicole is one of those rare website designers who is not only ridiculously creative but incredibly organized too. She understood the spec of the three projects which we have worked on and added extra value to the website with her input. The best part about working with Nicole is that she will bring joy to any project that she works on.”

The Result

an engaging website experience that gets travellers excited to explore Australia

Welcome to Travel is experiencing rapid growth, and it warranted a website that mirrors the remarkable thoughtfulness, care, and value they invest in their tours and services. The newly designed website effectively showcases their extensive offerings in engaging ways, igniting excitement among travellers about exploring Australia. Ultimately, the website aims to inspire travellers to book one of Welcome to Travel’s exceptional tours across the country.

I’m pleased to share that Darryl was genuinely delighted with the outcome of the website redesign. He even mentioned that collaborating on this project was one of his highlights of 2023, which speaks volumes about our partnership and shared dedication to enhancing the Welcome to Travel experience.

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