Website for RocUp Holidays

Personal Recommendation

What a thoroughly enjoyable project this was! The scenario was perfect in all ways and the end result was better than anything myself or the client had imagined … it doesn’t get any better than that.

My good friend Catherine Spencer put me in touch with a remarkable young lady called Bonita Norris who needed a website design ASAP for a new project she was starting. Bonita is the youngest person on record to reach both the summit of Mt. Everest and the North pole … she did both by 22. Google it, she’s phenomenal.

Bonita gave me complete artistic freedom and as a result shot to the top of my priority list and released the creative juices! I pinged a message to my graphics guru in Melbourne Anthony Costa and he set about creating a brand. The company was to be called ‘RocUp Holidays’ and was to offer a unique opportunity to go to to Kalymnos and go climbing with 1 of 3 ‘Roc Star’ Climbers. Our audience was going to be formed of some of the coolest and most awesome young people on the planet … so branding was of paramount importance.

Branding

There were a few diverse sketches and ideas but the final design was slick and clean, and (in my humble opinion) – very cool. I registered the domain name ‘RocUp.uk‘ … and we were off and running.

I had an image in my head of what I wanted to achieve and this was helped no end when I discovered that everyone involved was gorgeous and had lots of their own high resolution stock photography. My website designs always aim to be clean, minimalist and visually driven … you can always embed content at the 2nd level, once visitors are hooked. The added challenge was to weave eCommerce into all of this and still keep it clean and easy to follow – we even managed to make the terms & conditions look cool.

Techy Bit

As always we kicked off with a WordPress build. I then added a theme from Salient that I’d used before and added in a Woo-Commerce plug-in and then had the added complication of plugging this into SAGE pay, but it all came together nicely. One plug-in I used for the first time was the SeedProd ‘Coming soon Pro and I have to say, it was fantastic – the best plug-in I’d ever used. It logged all visitors directly into the database and we were able to mass email them as a priority list just before the website went live and started taking bookings.

Visitors are able to visit the website, find out about the holiday, the pro climbers, the coaches and the location and facilities too. They can then choose their week and reserve their place by either paying the deposit or the full amount, securely with a credit card. As part of the payment process they provide an email address and a password is generated to go with it and create their WordPress ‘customer’ login. To pay the balance they simply login using these details.

Review

As I say, I loved working on this project – every minute of it – and I’m looking forward to updating it all for the next holiday as they have enjoyed great success with this first round. To top it off, check out this wonderful review from Bonita:

Max was brilliant at comms from the moment I made contact. He mostly never took more than a few minutes to answer any of my emails. This was fantastic as we could always rely on him to deal with an issue as soon as it cropped up. We are also total tech novices and Max explained everything really well. His constant support made the whole process (mostly) stress free.

Max was very creative and bought some amazing design ideas to us, which have made up the foundations of our brand- for instance the colour schemes on the site and the way the site flows.

This is the first time I’ve ever needed to have a website and I have some ideas in my head but no idea about what was possible or even what my ideas would look like in real life. Max was incredibly patient, coming up with lots of options and in that process I really discovered what I wanted the site to look like. He took our sketchy ideas and built an amazing, functioning website to represent our business. We couldn’t have asked for more.

We feel incredibly lucky to have found Max and cannot believe how our site has turned out. It’s just so much better than what we expected. It’s really helped us secure business and everyone we speak to about our new business says how impressed they are with our site.

I would highly recommend Max!