The Client & Brief
Charley Boorman is a professional adventurer. He specialises in touring the world by motorbike, and his travel documentaries have been primetime smash hits for the BBC, Channel 5 and Sky.
But despite being a household name with a string of bestselling books and DVDs to his name, Charley didn’t have a website. He needed a site that would reflect his personality and show everything he did. It needed to give fans a connection to Charley – a chance to find out about his latests daredevil adventures, see exclusive videos and photographs, and buy merchandise.
Our Solution
The Design
We knew that for the site to be a success, it had to evoke a sense of adventure and exploration, and demonstrate Charley’s friendliness and down to earth nature.
Map
Our map design illustrated Charley’s adventurous nature so perfectly that it was picked up by Channel 5 and used in the visuals for the ‘Extreme Frontiers’ series.
Layout
Charley’s marketing team needed to be able to quickly update the website with each new TV series, and new merchandise. We built a very adaptable system that would allow them to refresh the focus of the website with minimum fuss.
Rolling Banner
Charley’s adventures are non-stop, and he wanted a way to quickly tell fans about his latest experiences.
Charley has a large fanbase and he’s committed to them, often going out of his way to talk to individuals on his live tours. So it wasn’t enough that there was a link to Twitter from his website; the Twitter feed had to be seamlessly embedded into the design and be extremely prominent from the homepage.
Gallery & Video
True fans want to see behind-the-scenes footage of Charley’s adventures – this is exactly what they get with the video and picture galleries. We helped make life easier for Charley’s marketing team by making picture optimise for the web automatically. No more fiddling with resizing, they could just upload high-resolution original versions and the system would do the hard work.
Shop
Easy Access
The marketing team has easy access to the priority areas of the shop, to help them draw attention to the latest items on sale.
Basket
Browsing for content
Fans can browse the items for sale by the tabs, which show the different types of item, and also by the adventure, to see all of the merchandise associated with a particular trip.
Shop by Adventure
Charley Boorman has done a lot of TV series, and each one has its own set of merchandise.
Single Product
The product page has detailed product information, including multiple views of the item thanks to a large-image lightbox feature. Thumbnail images of related products help to cross-sell other items. Links to Facebook and Twitter also enable fans to share items on social media.
Checkout
The checkout stage of the website is uncluttered and straightforward. It’s easy for customers to check and amend their order, and before they make a purchase they can check the shipping costs – a simple but extremely effective way to help customers commit to making a purchase.
The Result
Charley Boorman is a popular and extremely well-liked TV celebrity adventurer, and now he has the website to match.
The website receives well over 100,000 visits a year and it’s a powerful online extension of Charley’s brand. The ecommerce side of the website is highly successful, and the success of the website design can be seen in the fact that Channel 5 chose to use elements of it in the visuals for one of Charley’s latest documentaries.
Billy Ward
Marketing consultant for Charley Boorman
“Great innovative team – excellent with following ideas through…”
