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Global conference and corporate event venue finders for UK businesses.

www.confpeople.co.uk

The Project

We were approached by The Conference People to modernise their website, creating a website application for the business that centralised and simplified their services using contemporary UX web design methods and techniques.

The Conference People turn venue finding into an art form, sourcing the perfect venue for a conference or corporate event for businesses in the UK and internationally. They provide venue finding services free of charge and wanted to convey this more effectively through their website.

Our brief

BarkWeb were tasked with reviewing their current website, both the design and performance, and providing a conceptual design solution as a way of future-proofing the site for years to come.

BarkWeb proposed an interrogation of their data in Google Analytics and a UX design approach for the new website design and deployed on our newest platform, Jolojo, that was fast, easy to use, and prioritised page speed. The Conference People agreed with our proposal and we embedded a BarkWeb and Jolojo team to work closely with The Conference People during the conceptual design phase.

Website design

Working closely with The Conference People, our shared concept for the new site was simple, mobile-first and high-impact. By creating dynamic webforms on-page alongside services content, and a sticky header that elegantly displayed the menu and phone number, we were able to dramatically simplify the workflows and reduce user clicks and steps to encourage greater conversions rates, and minimise abandonment.

The new design also had to emphasise The Conference People brand, and better communicate this to the user. BarkWeb used a combination of photography and new body copy throughout the material design and card-based layouts to achieve a greater brand impact directly and more frequently with the user.

Website development

Another requirement of the new design was that it was optimised for Google, so that The Conference People could better rely on their organic search presence for generating leads into the business. BarkWeb deployed the new design on their new platform, Jolojo. This platform is particularly effective on PageSpeed Insights (PSI) making it perfect for faster user experiences across desktop and mobile, and especially effective in Google's mobile-first index.

The site architecture was changed to prioritise key pages, such as Venue Finding and the Room Capacity Calculator. Other pages were restructured and the overall sitemap was reduced about 30% to remove non-performing pages. This process streamlined the new website more effectively for search engines and users.

Using Jolojo meant that BarkWeb had access to content frameworks, a system that facilitates the use of reusable components and layouts for quickly scaling page creation. This also allows the Conference People to very quickly be able to build new pages or post new blogs fast, and easily, should they want to publish more content on the website in future.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

The Conference People have invested in both SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) as a way of marketing the website to their audience. BarkWeb were tasked with ensuring a smooth transition from the old website to launching the new website, with the expectation that organic search rankings would improve once the new website was launched over time.

The process started with an in-depth interrogation of The Conference People's, identifying trends over time, key content, non performing areas of the site, and analysing user engagement throughout the website. What became clear was that the project was both a UX design project, as well as streamlining pages and workflows to improve user engagement levels.

As part of the reduction of non performing pages, BarkWeb used the Sitemap and Google Search Console to identify all the indexed and active pages on the old site, effectively mapping old URLs to any new URLs or if there were any changes to the site architecture to ensure a seamless experience in Google's index and for users following old links to the site.

Take a look at The Conference People's new website at www.confpeople.co.uk

Here's what our client had to say about us

"We have worked with a number of web design, marketing support and SEO companies over the years and you are quite simply the best!

Our new website has become our pride and joy, with excellent comments from the Meetings Industry Community, in the UK and Internationally. You understood our brief and translated it perfectly as well as reacting to our sometime hyperbolic ideas! We love your high level Customer Service and the friendly yet very professional support that we have from the whole BarkWeb team. Thank you; we look forward to continuing our journey with BarkWeb!"

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