The New Bikesnwines.com Website

Bikesnwines.com is a bicycle tour company based in Cape Town, South Africa. It specialized in taking bicycle tours through the wine lands of the Western Cape. It has grown into renting bikes in Cape Town as well as running bicycle tours through the city of Cape Town and the Cape peninsula.

We first started working with Bikesnwines.com to fix their SEO and help them get more direct bookings and reduce the commission they were paying travel and bookings agents.

Quintin from Bikesnwines.com had a big idea of taking his present website into a fully automated online booking process along with a total revamp of his website and tour explanations.

We are proud with what we delivered to Bikesnwines.com, and continue to improve and tweak their site through our ongoing relationship.

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The most important page on the site is the tour page, which shows all the bicycle tours Bikes ‘n Wines run through the Western Cape.

It was quite difficult to get a picture of the tour options available on the old site, and Quintin wanted all the tours to be visible on one page. He also wanted them to be easily filterable by the tours different categories.

The first thing we did was build a portfolio for all the tours and then created a masonry grid to show them all on one page.

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The next and slightly trickier task was to custom build the filter system that Quintin had imagined.

We created a filter in the sidebar of the page which could filter by the type of tour, the tour length, whether it is bookable online and where the tour takes place.

As a visitor selects the different categories, the tours not applicable disappear leaving only those that fit the selection still visible. The page uses Ajax to change without needing to reload the page, which vastly improves the usability and speed of the site.

We also added some featured tours to the sidebar to help visitors choose popular tours.

The individual tour pages were also very important. The old pages used to be very text heavy, and we wanted to convey what a guest could expect on a tour, through simple text and images.

We used an accordion system to group relevant information cleanly and not take up to much space on the page. We also created a gallery on the left hand side full of tour images.

These pages link with Bikes n Wines online booking system which is run in a partnership with Activitar.com so visitors can see tour availability, book and pay online.

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We also added an individual tour enquiry system that pops up for tours that are not on the online system yet.

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In addition to this, we revamped their online payment system for tours not yet connected with Activitar.

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Bikes ‘n Wines also wanted to enter the bike rental market in Cape Town, with the launch of their new bicycle cafe &bikes. Their new cafe is based in at 32 Loop Street where they offer coffee, snacks, Cape Town city bicycle tours and bicycle rentals.

We created a page where website visitors could quickly see the bikes on offer as well as what was included with the rental, and then make an enquiry for the bike they wanted.

Ultimately the goal is to add bike rentals to the online booking system, but for now we are using the main website to capture rentals.

AdWords & SEO

Getting visitors to the new Bikes ‘n Wines website, and making sure we didn’t lose our strong Google search rankings was an important part of the new website build. Because we had an existing relationship with Bikes ‘n Wines we were able to structure the new website in a way that minimized ranking loses and in most cases allowed us to maintain our SEO even with the change to the new site.

We also implemented Google AdWords to bring even more visitors to the site for searches such as “Bike Tour Cape Town” and “Bike Rental Cape town.”

Through busy times of high competition our online marketing efforts have really paid off for Bikes ‘n Wines.

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A Mutli-Lingual Website

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Bikes ‘n Wines has many foreign tourists as guests and clients who are traveling to Cape Town and experiencing all she has to offer. Not all of these guests are comfortable in English, so Quintin wanted the site to be available in a number of languages.

We implemented a system that allows the site to be viewed in one of 6 languages. English, German, Dutch, French, Italian or Portuguese. There is an easily language switcher located int he header.

What is fantastic is that this system translates the site automatically and conforms with Google’s SEO standards.

Indola.co.zaindola-mountain-bike-apparelAlexia Usgaard WebsiteAlexia Usgaard