Talented developers at Tourdust, James Croft and Basil Safwat set out on an 8-hour code marathon to use HTML5 and CSS3 as their tools of choice to bring a new concept to life. The result is a very beautiful site showcasing a Tourdust-operated multi-day trip up Mount Kilimanjaro, telling the story as you scroll. This particular technique was most notably made famous last year by Nike’s Betterworld campaign site, and more sites have started to do similar things recently.
Tourdust founder Ben Colclough tells us…
We’d done a couple of traditional blogs before for travelogue content such as this, but felt the format didn’t always do the content justice. The objective here was to develop web content that can at the same time be fundamentally useful and a rich visual experience enticing enough to create a desire to travel.
From a consumer point of view, the first iteration of this project was certainly a success. It could should be a lot shorter overall in order give more impact to the content which is included and keep the user from losing interest, but it’s very refreshing to see something different from the standard yet-another-blog-post.
From an industry point of view, looking to this format as a method of summarising a trip and gauging its effectiveness both in terms of promoting the destination content, as well as who was reached by the content… it would be great to see something like this taken even further. Certainly there are visuals which could be created using Google Maps, Foursquare and Instagram (similar to what TravMonkey did recently) that could really bring this to life.
What do you think? Would you ever consider telling the story of a trip you’ve been on in this sort of way? Would seeing someone else’s trip highlights in this format entice you to go there?
It seems to load in starts and fits on my laptop which makes for a slow and frustrating experience and I don’t think it’s quite *that* unique an idea yet. Tricked out a bit more, perhaps yes – as you mentioned. I do like that people are trying new things because I think every day of how trip reporting could be made more interesting and this certainly inspires that wondering even more.