When we originally built Atta's site it was of course built to the industry standards and practices of the time. By the time Atta were ready for a rebuild however, these best practices and the standards had changed considerably. This coupled with the fact that Atta wanted a brand new design meant that effectively throwing away the entire site and rebuilding everything from the ground up was the only course of action.

A problem with their old site was that due to it's age, new sections and content had been bolted on in ways that had originally not been forseen, and which the existing design found it difficult to accommodate naturally. This is why we went right back to the discovery, and IA / UX phases. We wanted to ensure that the new design fullfilled the site's existing requirements, as well being able to accommodate new requirements when necessary.

One of the changes we implemented was a much cleaner and more accessible navigation structure for the new site. With the old design, visitors could only reach top-level areas from the homepage of the site. Once they had navigated to a top-level area, a left-hand navigation menu appeared which then provided access to sub-sections within that area.

We felt that all pages should be accessible from the homepage, so we built a clean, attractive drop-down menu that allows access to all areas of the site from all other areas of the site. In effect, any part of the site can be reached from any other part of the site.

Rebuilding the site-wide navigation in this way also allowed us to ensure that the different sub-sections were categorised and organised logically and effectively, so that visitors could seek out the sections they wanted to view intuitively.

The users of the Atta site can be broadly categorised into 2 different types; general visitors to the site (typically tourists) looking for information on travel products available for the African continent, and members of the site (which are the companies providing the products and services). As well as ensuring the general visitors had a great user experience with the site, it was also very important that the Atta members were able to use the site effectively to communicate with the visitors and that they too received a pleasant user experience.

A key feature of the new site is the questions and answers section where visitors to the site can post questions related to travel and tourism in Africa. This is great for the site's visitors because it allows them find answers to questions relevant to their own personal requirements, without being directed to a predefined set of common Q&As that may or may not provide the information they need. It's also great for members because it allows them a forum to show off their specialised knowledge and expertise on subjects related to their specific industry.

We decided to implement a voting system for member's answers in order to introduce and competitive nature to the questions and answers section. This allows the most helpful members to be recognised for the contributions to the site and allows them to build up a reputation as knowledgable and helpful to both individual visitors and the wider community as a whole.

  The member's directory is another key area of the site. It was already a part of the existing (pre-rebuild) version of the site, but was simply a hard-to-maintain static list of members. In the revamped version we added advanced filtering controls that let visitors filter members by country, category, activity, or alphanumerically. The filtering is all based on the client rather than the server, which makes it blazing fast, and is paginated for the borwser's convenience.

It was also important for Atta that the directory be accessible to mobile users so that members can be searched and found by visitors whilst on the move. To cater for this we exposed the members directory data as a mobile site, using a custom deisgn and template, and an open-source mobile detection library.