Castles, historic houses and visitor attractions have a fairly obvious advantage when it comes to website design – there’s usually no shortage of wonderful or beautiful things to show. Sadly, beautiful doesn’t necessarily mean useful.
Through our work with Leeds Castle, Hever Castle, The Historic Dockyard Chatham, Kent Attractions and more, we’ve seen how much a heritage website is expected to do. It needs to inspire someone to visit, help them plan a day, sell tickets, promote events, explain memberships, support weddings and hospitality and tell the story of the place itself. Sometimes all before someone’s worked out where to park.
The best heritage and tourism websites need to balance inspiration with information and make moving between the two feel effortless.
You’re not really selling a ticket
Someone arriving on an attraction website might be planning tomorrow with the kids. Someone else is researching a wedding. Another visitor wants opening times. A tourist is deciding whether it’s worth adding you to their itinerary. A member wants to know what’s on this weekend. They’re all visiting the same website with completely different definitions of what matters.
For Leeds Castle, that meant rethinking the digital experience around the guest rather than the organisation. The website needed to bring together the castle, grounds, events, accommodation, hospitality and other experiences while making it much easier to find information and book.
The commercial opportunity is bigger than selling admission too. For instance, a visitor looking for a family day out today could become a member tomorrow, return for a seasonal event or discover an overnight stay they hadn’t previously considered. Beyond that they may become an advocate, encourages new guests along the way.
Good UX helps people find what they came for. Great UX helps them discover what they didn’t know they wanted and then keep coming back.
Turning complexity into a simple day out
Heritage organisations are often complicated behind the scenes with different attractions, different ticket types and events, memberships, donations, retail, learning, weddings, accommodation, private hire, golf, TV and film spots and that’s before we’ve got to the content about the history of the place itself. Sometimes multiple booking and legacy systems accumulated over years and sometimes none of them work together.
The visitor doesn’t care about any of that. They just want to know what’s on, whether their children will enjoy it, how much it costs and where to buy a ticket.
One of our heritage website rebuilds involved moving away from numerous ageing legacy systems and bringing ticketing and booking together through a single ecommerce approach. The result was a 25% increase in online sales.
That’s why simplifying a website isn’t necessarily about having less on it. It’s about making the complexity underneath feel simple to the person using it.
Different places need different digital experiences
There’s also a danger of treating ‘heritage’ as a category with a ready-made design language.
Old building. Serif typeface. Lots of history. Job done.
Except Hever Castle, Leeds Castle and The Historic Dockyard Chatham are completely different visitor experiences.
For Hever Castle, the opportunity stretches far beyond its Tudor history; Gardens, family experiences, seasonal events, stays and other activities all contribute to the reasons people visit and, importantly, return.
At The Historic Dockyard Chatham, we needed to make 400 years of maritime history accessible while creating clearer journeys through visiting, events, learning, retail, charitable giving as well as property leasing.
And for Kent Attractions, the challenge is different again: helping people discover and navigate a network of destinations rather than one individual place.
The website has to communicate what makes a destination distinctive, not simply communicate that it’s historic.
Design for the visit before the visit
A tourism website is part of the visitor experience long before anyone walks through the gates. Google research has previously described travel planning as a series of ‘micro-moments’, from dreaming and researching to booking and experiencing. That behaviour is particularly relevant to attractions, where people might move repeatedly between inspiration and practical questions before committing to a visit.
That means beautiful photography matters (those beautiful things we talked about earlier), and so does storytelling.
But so do opening times, ticket prices, accessibility information, travel directions, what’s on today, whether you can bring the dog, where you can eat, whether you need to book, what happens if it rains – All these things aren’t secondary content. For someone deciding whether to visit, they’re part of the experience you’re selling.
And then there’s the opportunity to sell more
Cross-selling shouldn’t mean throwing a pop-up at someone immediately after they’ve bought a ticket. When it’s considered and done properly, it means understanding what else might make their experience better. Connecting relevant things at the right time.
For instance, someone exploring half-term activities might be a good membership prospect, someone browsing a Christmas event might be interested in an overnight stay, or someone researching the venue could discover a wedding or private hire offer.
The breadth of many heritage destinations is one of their greatest commercial strengths. The website should reveal that breadth naturally rather than hiding each part of the organisation in a different corner of the navigation.
Because the job isn’t simply to get someone through checkout – it’s to turn interest into a visit, a visit into a better experience and, hopefully, one visit into many.
If your heritage or attraction website looks good (or doesn’t) but isn’t converting, we’d love to help.
