Forever Edinburgh

Creating Edinburgh’s Flagship Website

Catering to millions of visitors and thousands of residents, we gave Edinburgh’s official visitor guide the digital platform it deserved – with all the bells and whistles.

A city with a global reputation as one of the top destinations to visit, and the UK’s second most popular city after London, Edinburgh required a new destination marketing website that matched the Scottish capital’s showstopping character and fulfilled the demands of its users.

Forever Edinburgh (FE) - The Official Guide to Edinburgh is the city’s primary destination and promotions platform, which attracts millions of annual users and generates millions of pageviews.

Run by the dedicated destination marketing team in The City of Edinburgh Council, the website’s primary audience was predominantly inbound leisure visitors, but the FE team were eager to cast a wider net and create a website that not only enhanced the visitor experience, but also served the needs of the city of Edinburgh residents, local businesses, and students.

With high ambitions for enhancing the customer experience at all stages of the user journey, the Council needed a brand-new website that would better serve the needs and expectations of global audiences, with inbuilt agility and flexibility in order to continually meet market needs.

Creating through collaboration

A tight deadline for the project meant that its successful delivery depended on a close collaboration between Whereverly and the FE team.

A well-defined and structured delivery process alongside the establishment of a variety of easy-to-use communications channels became the project’s backbone and ensured a smooth and seamless delivery without compromising the quality of the product.

Design

Edinburgh is a compact capital city that packs a punch, so we designed a website to match it. Created to feel confident and pragmatic, we embraced the brand’s new colour palette, with strong use of the Forever Edinburgh orange fonts used to make the site instantly recognisable and ownable. Typography was used to create hierarchy throughout with scale and colour, and varied photo-layouts were used to create pace while still engaging users.

Edinburgh didn’t just want a pretty website; it wanted one that users found easy to navigate and felt compelled to return to again and again. We undertook a thorough design journey that put usability at the forefront. The result? An intuitive, easy to use website with an eye-catching design.

"Whereverly are an incredibly talented, innovative and creative website agency, who find solutions without hesitation and push technical boundaries to exceed expectation. From brief to launch, the team were with us every step of the way. Account management was delivered to perfection, support was available at every point in need, and overall, delivered a very positive experience for us all round."

Destination Marketing Manager Forever Edinburgh, The Official Guide to Edinburgh

Selecting the strongest building blocks

The Forever Edinburgh team had high ambitions for the continued development of Edinburgh as a world-class destination, and so it was important to create a website that was stable, scalable, and secure.

Recognising the need for flexibility and longevity, our team selected WordPress to power the site, allowing us to develop not only templates for the core page types, but also reusable components to use across all content. This gave the FE team the freedom to create a host of different pages as needed, unconstrained by an outdated CMS.

Getting businesses onboard

In addition to supplying the FE team with a solid but versatile base on which to create their site, it was also imperative to provide local businesses with a space to promote their services from an easy-to-use platform.

Integrating our bespoke DMS, My Whereverly, with WordPress gives business owners the ability to not only create their own listings, but to amend and update them again and again, ensuring that the FE site remains up-to-date and a reliable source of information for its users.

Giving users a new digital experience

Launching in the summer of 2023, the revitalised Forever Edinburgh website went live to the public at the height of AI exploration. An emerging technology, the Whereverly team seized the opportunity to provide users with a unique digital experience, by creating an AI chatbot designed specifically for the Edinburgh team.

Developed to crawl the new website’s content, the AI chatbot not only created an engaging and interactive experience for users but also provided them with high-level answers to their questions, delivering useful and curated information they needed within seconds.

Driving growth through data

Beyond creating a website for the council’s target audience, we also created a digital report from which the Forever Edinburgh team could easily monitor visitor trends, behaviours, and interests.

Collating data from GA4 and Big Query, our team created a detailed report, updated in real time for the FE team to view. Easy to read and varied, the report brings value to all members of the FE team, from project managers to content creators.

These insights, available at the click of the button, enables better content planning, improved campaign monitoring and more informed decision making.