Hiker's Guide is built with hikers in mind, serving the Australian hiking community today with a vision to expand internationally. The portal provides value to hikers by providing hiking locations, routes, tips, ideas and more. The portal is user driven with admin moderation & validation providing a credible hiking and social platfrom.
We developed all the brand elements from the logo to every single icon used on the site keeping the hiking enthusiasts and passionates in mind being the target market. Additionally, we kept the logo minimalistic tying it up to the colours and scenery hikers identify with.
Having the user top of mind the portal was designed to provide an epic user experience on desktop, tablets and smart phones having a unique design for mobile devices that goes beyond the standard behaviour of responsive web elements. Zain Digital's inhouse built PHP framework was utilised providing maximum scalability for future growth, Search Engine Friendly code & admin ability to SEO the various site pages.
Banner advertising supporting the portal's future development and feature expansion was adopted as a main revenue driver combined with a number of other revenue generation strategies. User generated content, blogs and hiking tips are strategically search engine optimised for better ranking on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Easy to use yet sophisticated search engine providing users with multiple options to zero in on what they are looking for.
Web 2.0 and the social media boom has driven such web portals to be user driven.