Global Routes - Branding, website design & development
Global Routes offer its students an unparalleled opportunity to immerse themselves into small rural communities, develop long-lasting cross-cultural relationships, and make positive contributions that will last a lifetime.
THE CHALLENGE
Global Routes Since 1967, they have led over 10,000 students around the globe on meaningful, fun, and growth-oriented summer programs. With years of experience Global Routes decided it was time to make some changes. With a website redesign it was also the opportunity to make some tweaks to their brand identity.
We had three challenges:
- A rebranding: how to give their brand identity a new air but keeping some elements that were deeply rooted within the organisation. The brand hadn’t been updated in the last 10 years.
- A website design: how to design a website that has more than 15 different summer programs, with different highlights, locations, requirements, in an attractive way for GenZ (!!!) and for parents as well, so they can trust Global Routes and their services.
- A user-friendly platform: one of the biggest blockers for the team was not being able to update the website because of its backend complexity.
OUR APPROACH
First of all, we asked the Global Routes team to fill in a brief: all the information they could share with us about them as a company, their programs (services), locations, team, pricing, history, etc. Once we had that information we worked closely together to identify their goals, target audience, and other requirements for the website. This process can be time-consuming and requires excellent communication and collaboration skills between teams. It was worth it. We had a great foundation of where we needed to go in terms of branding and website redesign and functionality.
Working in the rebranding allowed us to create a high expectation about how the website might look. To achieve this we did quite some research especially about Gen Z. Knowing Global Routes’ target audience from the beginning allowed us to build something for them. Something they would like. Something they would be interested in.
Once we got the ok we jumped into our natural process of site architecture and wireframing. We made sure that the team felt good, happy, pumped about the new design and raised concerns, changes before jumping into development. This part always takes more time, you make sure that all your design proposals get 100% approved so you don't lose time once you upload to the website. This bit has worked for us amazing!
During this stage we thought about creating a user-friendly design that was easy to navigate and use. This required a deep understanding of the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design principles, as well as knowledge of the latest design trends and best practices.
We wanted to set up a beautiful front-end but also a super easy to use backend.
Once the last phase started - development - we made sure to reorganise all the content, messaging, look and feel so there was a before and after.
