Tourism guide directory for Tour Guides Northern Ireland
A directory and tourism hub for Tour Guides NI, the body behind Northern Ireland’s accredited guides. Visitors find a guide by region, tour type and language, and the guides publish their own tours and profiles through a portal of their own.
Tour Guides NI in numbers
The challenge: invisible accreditation
Tour Guides NI is the body behind Northern Ireland’s accredited guides, and its members were largely invisible online.
A visitor planning a trip from another country has no way of telling an accredited guide from anyone else with a website. The guides themselves are spread across every region and between them cover a range of languages and specialisms, none of which helps if there is no way to search on any of it.
The body had a credibility problem of its own. Accreditation means training, assessment and continuing professional development, and none of that is visible to somebody comparing search results from three thousand miles away.
The guides are also the ones with the content. Any system that relied on head office to publish every tour and profile would have produced a directory that was out of date within a month of launch.
Our approach: search that matters
Northern Ireland’s accredited guides were largely invisible to the people who most needed to find them.
The site is built around the search that actually matters. A visitor picks the region they are travelling to, the kind of tour they want and the language they want it in, and gets the accredited guides who match all three. Accreditation is the thing being surfaced, which is the entire point of the body.
Each region gets its own page, with imagery, video and detail about what there is to see, so somebody planning a trip has a reason to be on the site well before they are looking for a guide at all.
The guides publish their own tours and profiles through the portal, which is the only way a directory like this stays current. Head office manage accreditation, regions and site content, and there is a registration route for guides joining the body.
What we built for Tour Guides NI
A directory only works if the people in it keep it current, so the guides publish their own.
Find the right guide
A visitor filters by the region they are visiting, the type of tour they want and the language they want it in, and gets the accredited guides who match.
Guide profiles
Each guide gets a profile and publishes their own tours through the portal, which is the only way a directory of this kind stays current.
Region pages
Every region of Northern Ireland with imagery, video and detail on what there is to see, which brings people in long before they want a guide.
Accreditation surfaced
The training, assessment and development behind accreditation made visible, which is the reason the body exists at all.
Guide registration
A route for guides joining the body, managed by head office alongside the rest of the site content.
Built for visitors from abroad
Language is a first-class filter rather than a footnote, because most people searching are planning a trip from another country.
The Tech-Spec
Laravel and Vue, with a portal the guides use to publish their own tours and profiles. Head office manage regions, attractions and accreditation, and the search runs across region, tour type and language so a visitor can filter on all three at once.
HTML5, SCSS, CSS3, vue.js
Laravel (MVC framework)
Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Mailchimp
Services on this project
Most of our clients use more than one.
Bespoke websites
Designed and built from scratch around your business rather than adapted from a template. Every page and every field is there because it earns its place.
→ 02Web applications
Software that does a job for the business rather than describing it. Members platforms, custom admin software and internal tools built around how the work actually gets done.
→More work
A few of the other projects we have built.
