Site Structure: City Cruises

Draft – Additional Updates Forthcoming!

Summary

These two separate, but similar, projects focused on combining acquisitions into a more comprehensive location-based site structure on our larger digital presence in both Boston and the Greater Washington DC Area.

In Boston, City Cruises by City Experiences had acquired Boston Harbor Cruises in 2019, and in the Greater DC Area, City Cruises by City Experiences had acquired Potomac Riverboat Co. in 2016.

Both strong legacy brands with water taxi components, these services were present, but not integrated on the site structure for the City Experiences site. Working directly with stakeholders for the City Cruises Boston & DC team, as well as the acquired brands, we were able to make these experiences more visible for purchase. This move also optimized these port pages for SEO.

The Process

The Process: Boston Site Structure

Our Boston acquisition was a high performer. However, when integrated into the City Experiences domain, performance dropped. To fix this, we took a comprehensive look at the product page and evergreen page structure with our local team.

During this process we found:

  • On-Page Structure
    • Product pages were long and overly image heavy- and reducing load time
    • Pages didn’t have a clear booking calendar/flow
    • Checking out to purchase was a three-page process, instead of the fleet standard of two
    • Contained a full FAQ section – creating duplicate page info (harming SEO) and encouraging out of funnel actions
  • The URL structure had an extra layer (/boston/city-cruises/boston-harbor/[product]) vs (/boston/city-cruises/[product])
  • A need for top-level navigation and landing pages to support these “new” product types

The Action

  • Migrated our internal product system to format in shorter, more enticing product pages
  • Created a re-direct system that sent relevant pages to corrected urls and allowed us to collapse redundant pages and streamline the guest experience.
  • Product Page Before
  • Product Page After Re-Structure
Before and After of BHC Product Page
This Drop-Down Menu from the Main Navigation places The Structure of products in line with the rest of the Boston Products
  • New Sightseeing/Tranit Page Site Structure – Accessible From Navigation

The Process: DC Site Structure

The Potomac Riverboat Co. pages were hidden within the DC subfolder of the site. This created a hard-to-access experience for Water Taxi commuters and sightseeing customers. To better integrate these products, their respective vessels, and information into the DC digital architecture, we moved the products and pages and removed & condensed duplicates where possible to better serve the larger DC market. This also provides clarity in alignment with the portfolio-wide approach to location-based experiences.  

During this process we found:

  • Unnecessary/Un-used pages
  • Hard-to-find FAQ sections

Process Steps Coming Soon! For more details about my experience with information architecture + site structure please check out my Experience Page!

Brian