iseekgolf.com is Australasia’s #1 golf site with over 75,000 active members, 13,000 articles and nearly every course in Australasia.

Since 2001, the site had grown out of the simple framework originally built by iseekgolf.com and was bursting at the seams.

We were contracted to develop the next generation of golf websites with heavy social networking and user interaction through their active forum, article and product commenting and reviews and dynamic tee time booking.

Gathering requirements and information architecture

iseekgolf.com has scores an articles for every player from every round on almost every tournament on the major tours around the globe. Add to this the directory of every golf course across the country and you have a whole lot of data that needs to be organised in a simple and find-able way. Another concern was to accommodate the aggressive growth plans the iseekgolf.com crew has for the site.

After nine iterations of the wireframes, all parties were happy with the working document we had produce.

Design

The objective was to maintain the strong sense of the iseekgolf.com brand while housing the vast amounts of data available across the site. Once the core branding elements had been locked down, the design phase essentially became an exercise in online typography.

css & xhtml

Being able to find iseekgolf.com on all the major search engines was one of the most important objectives for this phase. The other objective was the separation of the look and feel of the site from the programming (completed in-house by the talented Matt Allen).

Weatherzone is recognized as Australia’s leading commercial weather information provider to media and internet organisations serving customers in industry, agriculture, government, recreation, education and consumer markets.

Experiencing a dramatic increase in the amount of incoming traffic, Weatherzone had outgrown its original incarnation (see below).

Requirements gathering

With a team of in-house designers and developers, Conversant Studios was contracted to re-organise the organic structure of the existing site. Blessed with some truly magnificent content, Weatherzone had an army of loyal customers that had learned to use the site in its existing form… they were familiar and comfortable with the structure and had invested a significant amount of time coming to terms with this structure.

But the majority of users visited only one or two screens and did not invest the time and effort to dive deeper into the impressive content within the site.

Personas

After gathering as much raw data about the site as possible (including some customer surveys) we put together some personas and came up with four key customers.

Personas are representative archetypes of the key market segments. They are a synthesis of the core users of the site and the new segments the redeveloped site is targeting.

Information architecture

Once the personas had been defined and the key targets were defined, the information architecture (the blueprint) for the site took shape over several iterations.

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*note – the design and development was completed in-house by Weatherzone