A dip in the ocean can certainly be refreshing, but every now and then a website needs a bit of a refresh, too. The Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town has been a client of Flow’s since 2009, and earlier this year www.aquarium.co.za got some well-deserved design TLC.
Shy of calling it a complete overhaul, “design refresh” better describes the brief for the assignment: create some basic consistency across the website’s various landing pages, brighten up some of the elements of each landing page, and make it generally easier to navigate around and read.
Ryan Levenson was the Flow designer in charge of creating that consistency, and helping pull the site together. He says: “The focus of the project was to streamline the user through the vast amount of content on the site. Using a clean, uncomplicated design style, we focused on packaging the content into smaller, easy-to-browse sections and sub-sections to achieve a smooth user journey.”
As a multi-faceted institution, the Two Oceans Aquarium offers unique experiences to its visitors, like diving and penguin encounters, but also has a fully-fledged Environmental Education Centre, and is involved in a number of conservation projects. The website also has to be functional and informative for regular visitors, and Ryan’s solution for conveying all this widely-varied content was to create individual landing pages for each main section, with a grid system for displaying important highlights on each one.
Flow developer Klaus Alusa then got to work turning a designer’s idea into reality, and the end result is a clean front end, with an easy-to-navigate back end for a content writer to update relevant information quickly and easily.
“Although I was really anxious about the design refresh and the ‘switch’ from our old site to the new site, the changeover was seamless with very little hassle (well, we didn’t see all the work which went on behind the scenes by the designers and developers!),” says Helen Lockhart, communications and sustainability manager at the Two Oceans Aquarium.
“Our new site is indeed fresh and clean, and much easier to navigate. I think we also offer our visitors the info they want up front, without them having to search and scroll. And I love the ‘browse all species’ section – it’s a one-stop resource for people wanting to identify and learn more about marine and freshwater fishes, invertebrates, reptiles, frogs and birds.”
Head to www.aquarium.co.za and sea for yourself!
