London mayor Boris Johnson has launched the first London Tourist site for Chinese visitors, as the UK looks to appeal to the lucrative tourism market. The London & Partners Chinese website forms part of Johnson’s trade mission to China, and was produced by Anglo Chinese digital agency Qumin. The site, at www.london.cn, is aimed at […]
London mayor Boris Johnson has launched the first London Tourist site for Chinese visitors, as the UK looks to appeal to the lucrative tourism market.
The London & Partners Chinese website forms part of Johnson’s trade mission to China, and was produced by Anglo Chinese digital agency Qumin.
The site, at www.london.cn, is aimed at promoting London to Chinese visitors, students and the Chinese travel trade.
It is the first Chinese language website to be created by a UK regional authority or tourist office.
London & Partners, which is the official promotional agency for the Mayor of London, commissioned the Chinese website to attract greater numbers of tourists and students to the capital, plus showcase London to the Chinese travel trade.
Qumin’s brief was to produce a website that would appeal to the three target sectors, and allow each group the ability to pursue specific information applicable to them.
“London is home to an ever-increasing number of Chinese students and visitors, drawn to the city’s world-class education and famous attractions, history, shopping and culture,” said Simon McCaugherty, Digital Product Manager at London & Partners.
“Our new Chinese website is the definitive resource for tourists and students, providing accurate and trustworthy advice and information. Qumin have been instrumental in building the site. Their knowledge of the Chinese market ensured we did not simply build a replica of our English language sites. www.london.cn is tailored both in design and content to ensure Chinese visitors and students can get practical advice and inspiration according to their tastes and needs.”
To minimize download time and to ensure the website has optimum performance in searches on China’s most used search engine Baidu, the site is ICP registered and hosted over a CDN (content delivery network). The website also supports London & Partners’ social media campaign in China via a custom built Weibo App – one of the first of its kind outside of China.
Weibo is the most used social media platform used by Chinese professionals and white collar workers.
From its offices in London, Qumin produced all elements of the website including creative design, translation and technical production.
‘This has been a real passion project for us because London is an iconic visitor destination in China, and London & Partners has dedicated itself to really understanding market need and culture. It produced a really good challenging brief and took the time to listen when we made suggestions,’ says Qumin CEO, Arnold Ma.
‘As well as being able to create a website that effectively focuses on London it is also different things to different people by allowing visitors to segment themselves in order to easily identify and pursue the information they require.’
The creative execution is very fresh and modern in relation to conventional Chinese web design, but also addresses the browsing habits of Chinese consumers, which are very different to western UX (user experience). Heatmap tracking by Qumin shows that consumers will review the entire webpage before moving onto specific locations within a website. This is in comparison to western audiences who tend to click on the first or most prominent CTA on a page.
Qumin has combined Chinese specific UX requiring longer, information heavy pages with modern western technology such as parallax, to create a visitor experience that is significantly in advance of that provided by standard web design in China that is based on dated technology.
The website is powered in the backend by a modification of an open source content management system (CMS), built in both English and Chinese. This enables content management by staff based in offices in the UK or China. Despite the dynamic elements and complexity of the website, the CMS is completely modular, meaning almost all of the website can be edited without any programming knowledge or requirements.
www.QUMIN.co.uk
