Based on the South Coast of the UK in Poole, Condor Ferries have been a crucial part of the channel island community for a long time Founded back in 1964, they have operated a year-round service connecting the UK, Guernsey, Jersey and the Port of St Malo, successfully carrying over 1 million passengers each year.
Here at Cold Banana, we have been working with Condor since 2019, initially to help, support and restructure their pre-existing website. For this initial project, we have to ensure we were able to activate any new requests as well as fixing any pre-existing faults.
Our main priority was to understand the logic and details that went on behind the build. With us specializing in .NET and the Umbraco Platform, this task was more than straightforward for us, thanks to the overall depth and strength of knowledge and expertise of our team.
For the main website, we had to create and build entirely new templates to aid in the support of the businesses day to day running of the site, allowing their customer's experience to be just as expected, if not better than any other online presence.
Once the initial project was completed and pushed live we continued to grow our relationship with Condor by progressing to help improve and make changes to the functionality of the website, mobile app as well as the overall customer experience.
Some other notable items of work includes the Ferry Reservation System, Booking Engine and also a lot of maintenance on their mobile app.
Condor's mobile app was designed and built in an entirely different software, meaning it was very strict and regimented by not allowing a lot of changes to be done. As a team we worked hard and altered every single template on their desktop website and tailoring the look and functionalities and being able to pick up these web page and frame them inside of the mobile app. Not only did this help align the apps overall look, feel and fluidity mirroring the main website but also massively ramped up the user experience.
Like a lot of businesses, Condor was hit hard when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, with the international travel industry decreasing by 65% in the first half of 2020 compared to the previous year.
With the ban on all travel and a lot of customers having already booked their ferry crossings for that year, Condor and Cold Banana had to think fact on how best to approach and the situation. At the time, Condor has no way of handling such a high number of cancellations, questions and queries coming in in such a short time period. With such a high demand of customers needing answers and information we were able to create their own Voucher Application form, a new form on the website entirely built for any queries surrounding the Covid-19 restrictions.
User experience has always been at the forefront of our minds with any work we do for any of our clients. We opted to use A/B split testing on various landing pages throughout the website, from this type of testing we were able to see which designs and layouts respond best with their customers and lead to the move conversions. In order to achieve the very best results for Condor we worked closely with a local marketing agency, who specialize in that field and knew they could provide Condor with the expert knowledge to help boost their website even further.
Since Condor first came aboard, we have been able to build, create, fix and maintain many aspects of their website and we very much look forward to carrying on helping them sail to even bigger successes... (pun absolutely intended)