Together with the respected UK based digital designer Mike Kus, Nebulo was commissioned to re-develop Weekend Sherpa’s original website into a cutting edge platform that explores exciting things to do in California. After extensive discussion and planning, we produced wireframes as a blue print for all concerned to work from and once the template designs came through from Mike we developed the front and back end code for the project.

Based around the idea of a digital magazine publishing weekly ‘issues’ (groups of stories) categorised by region and activity, Weekend Sherpa gives the user the ability to choose between displaying issues about North or South California. After viewing 5 stories the user is asked to sign up to the weekly newsletter for either North or South or they can sign up to both. The two newsletters are automatically built in mailchimp according to the weekly content being published on the website. Once signed up the user can ‘favourite’ stories to be held in their own user area within ‘want to do’ it or ‘did it’ lists.

Instagram posts tagged #weekendsherpa are fed through from Weekend Sherpa’s followers to a visual grid at the base of most pages and and more completely to a ‘community feed’.

The ‘most popular’ stories over the previous 30 days are constantly tracked and displayed automatically in the site. Page load speed for such a content rich site was always going to be a challenge so we used lazy loading to pull in certainly pieces of content when needed rather than on page load.  We also optimised the display of videos by ensuring that mobile devices get served smaller versions of the mp4 file to improve speed and data usage for the user.

Nebulo managed the complex task of content migration from their old website, mapping 1500 plus categorised stories to the new information architecture. We continue to manage the development of the website on a monthly basis.