Here at ePresence, our Digital Marketing Team are delighted to work with one of Cork’s most loved attractions – Fota Wildlife Park.
Fota Wildlife Park welcomes around 460,000 visitors through its gates every year. With so many people visiting and online booking now essential due to Covid-19, Fota Wildlife Park needed to redevelop it’s website to cater to visitor and organisational needs as well as enhancing the online capabilities of the site ie. bookings, ticket sales and annual pass transactions.
See For Yourself, Fota Wildlife Park’s New Website
Getting To Know Their Needs
Working closely with the Fota Wildlife Park team over the years has helped us at ePresence to understand their needs, what functionality was required and what hurdles needed to be overcome. With the lockdowns in force, our teams met over video calls to discuss the different elements of the site. The team at Fota Wildlife Park are as passionate about ensuring that their visitors enjoy a great day out as they are about animal conservation. It was important to them, and us, that the new site reflected that.
The website planning stage helped our team understand the key elements that were needed:
- A responsive website providing a great user experience across all devices while retaining the strong Fota Wildlife Park branding (look and feel) across the site
- Reflect the ethos of Fota Wildlife Park in delivering a great day out for the visitor, while promoting the core values of conservation, education, and research
- Allow for easy online booking
- Improve the online booking experience for both annual pass holders and day visitors
- Make planning a visit to Fota simple and easy for visitors
Reflecting an Ethos | Providing a Great Visitor Experience
Fota Wildlife Park welcomes visitors of all ages from all over the world. Fota Wildlife Park is a unique place where you can come face to face with free roaming animals and birds from different parts of the world. So, if it is a kangaroo that hops in front of you, or a ring-tailed lemur, which jumps down from a tree, each visit is sure to bring its own fantastic memories. The new website needed to reflect the atmosphere of the park.
The new website was designed to embrace the colours of the wildlife and their habitats, using the bright oranges of the tigers, lush greens of the Park’s landscape and flora and tropical pinks and purples of the many bird species. You can also see zebra stripes, the spots of giraffes, and more wild patterns, worked into the site’s graphics.
On the new Fota Wildlife Park homepage, visitors are greeted by a brightly coloured tree frog who is peeking out from the right-hand side of your screen, this web-footed website resident will follow you as you scroll through the page.
The new website aims to get the whole family excited about their Fota Wildlife Park visit. As you travel around the website, you can enjoy striking scenes from around the park. These include colourful images from school tours, the park’s new arrivals, the Asian Sanctuary, many of the endangered species, and plenty of wildlife images.
Easy Online Booking for Fota Wildlife Park Visitors
Fota Wildlife Park has introduced enhanced protocols and procedures to assist the community in preventing the spread of Covid-19. As part of that commitment, booking online is now essential.
The ePresence development team created a five-step, mobile optimised, online booking system to assist with this process.
The intuitive booking system can be accessed from any page of the Fota website. The site visitor is guided smoothly through selecting the date and time they would like to visit, the type of tickets and then payment. A stress-free process that is as easy to navigate on mobile as it is on a desktop, laptop, or phone.
Fota Wildlife Park’s annual pass holders follow the same simple steps to enter their pass number to book a time slot.
By developing an efficient online booking system for Fota Wildlife Park, we were able to assist them in reducing administration overheads. As a non-profit organisation dedicated to conservation, research, and education, this is a significant benefit for the park.
Everything You Need to Plan Your Visit To Fota Wildlife Park
Planning your visit to Fota Wildlife Park has never been so easy. Opening times, tickets and prices, directions and park rules are at your fingertips on the new Fota website.
For visitors who want to plan which animals to see first, you can even download a map of the park. Get the kids (and big kids) excited with a full-colour PDF map to print and keep.
Full details of accessibility options and Fota Wildlife Park’s facilities are listed in one place. You will find details of the restaurant, café and shop along with opening hours for each. Besides this are details for carers, families, wheelchair users, and visitors with autism
About Fota Wildlife Park
Fota Wildlife Park, part of the Zoological Society of Ireland, is located on 100 acres at Fota Island 10km east of Cork City and has an annual attendance of approximately 460,000 visitors. Fota Wildlife Park opened to the public nearly 40 years ago and has gone from strength to strength ever since. It is currently the second largest visitor attraction in Ireland outside of Leinster. Visit the new Fota Wildlife Park website to plan your visit.
About ePresence
ePresence Digital Marketing is an award-winning digital marketing agency with offices in Cork and Kerry. We provide professional digital marketing services and web development services that help businesses improve their online presence.
Call 021 236 2901 or email [email protected]
