High quality paper stock web design

Go to any paper print company and they will tell you that paper choice will make a significant difference to the look and feel of your brochure. The general rule is the heavier the paper’s weight (with resulting greater thickness), the better look and feel that will be achieved.

Customers may, when making a decision between two similar tours from competing operators, base it on the production quality of the brochure they have in front of them. A good working assumption, from the consumer’s perspective, is that the “better run” company will have the better produced brochure. Actually, this was pretty much the case a few years back - so was a good basis for a decision.

Firstly a story from 2000 or so. I helped set up a small tour operator company. It sold, and operated, adventure travel in the Middle East and Asia (India / Nepal) - including overland expeditions (we had 4 trucks at one stage). They were like this - and we went on longish routes:

The customer base was mainly individuals with an interest in adventure. I invested about £4000 (USD $8000) in the graphic design - and we did all the HTML and web page generation ourselves. The website looked like it had a £100k (USD$200k) spent on it - or more - and was as impressive as any other leading tour operator website of its generation. It was so good that it was written up in the Travel Trade Gazette (December 2000 edition) by Paul Richer - in an article titled “The death of the brochure” - and won New Media Age “website of the week” in August 2000. This was important back then.

Now I am not saying this because I want to recount 7 year old news - but because something amazing happened. Sales started to roll in. All the customers thought the site was great - and brought holidays just because they liked the design. Sales came in from people we hadn’t even had contact with prior to booking. This was 7 years ago and that was quite a thing for a travel company selling non-commodity (i.e. not hotels / flights) type products.

We had created a “high quality paper stock” website

People believed we were a large company from looking at the site - but we were not. However, the website blasted reassurance and this was all down to the design, good copy (text), great images - and a scale of website not seen previously (we had about 500 pages).

OK - back to now.

I am dealing with a couple of luxury tour companies so am seeing the same challenges again. One (with less than 5 staff) has an amazing brochure giving a very high credibility rating (and does very well converting customers). Their website though is pretty plain and doesn’t reek the same quality as their brochure does. They complain that they see their website as a cost - and it is not providing a return. This is true - their website in comparison to their brochure is offbrand, low quality and just not giving a quality feel to the customer. They will struggle to move from brochure based sales to web sales unless they improve their site.

With improvements in web design moving along at a fairly rapid pace - to create a “high quality paper stock” effect on a modern website is becoming harder and harder. The effect is still there but the target is moving….

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