Wild Voyager

Wild Voyager plans tailor-made wildlife safaris and journeys — the Masai Mara, the Serengeti, India's tiger forests and the far north. The site lets travellers explore trips by wildlife and destination, and tells the story of a company built on first-hand time in the field.

Wild Voyager sells private wildlife journeys, not packaged tours. Nobody books a gorilla trek or a tiger safari with a shopping cart. Every trip starts as a conversation with someone who has been there, so the website's real job is to start that conversation and to make a small specialist come across as knowledgeable as it really is.

The difficulty was volume. The company covers more than thirty countries, a dozen headline animals, nine journey themes and ten travel styles, alongside a journal, films, brochures and planning guides. Put all of that on one site and it quickly turns into the catalogue Wild Voyager is trying not to be. And because every sale happens after the enquiry, it mattered to know what a traveller had been reading before they got in touch.

I built the site on a custom WordPress theme written for the brand rather than a page builder, so every template follows the design exactly while the team still publishes destinations, journeys and journal posts from the dashboard. The navigation follows the way people actually plan a trip: by destination, by animal, or by how they like to travel. On desktop that is a set of wide dropdown menus; on a phone it folds into an accordion that opens one section at a time.

The homepage leads with full-screen wildlife film, which makes the case faster than any headline, but it could not be allowed to slow the page down. A still image loads first and the video only takes its place once frames are actually playing. Phones and desktops get their own video files, and the video is skipped altogether for visitors who have reduced motion switched on or who are on data-saver or a slow connection. The fonts are served from the site itself instead of a third-party service.

Enquiries are where the business happens, so every page carries a small tracking script. It keeps a note, in the visitor's own browser, of the pages they read and how long they spent on each. When they send any form, that history travels with the enquiry into Wild Voyager's CRM, and whoever picks it up can see straight away whether the traveller was reading about snow leopards or the Great Migration. It sets no cookies and makes no calls to outside services.