Visit Telemark

One whole destination, not scattered attractions

Telemark holds almost everything: a southern archipelago and bare high mountains, industrial heritage turned World Heritage, canal boats and a rich cultural life, all within a few hours' travel. But for a long time the region was seen as scattered, separate attractions, and as a traditional industrial and winter region. Visit Telemark's work, together with the region's operators, is about gathering that picture into one brand: Norway in miniature, a complete destination all year round. Our task was to let the website carry that picture, to show the whole and the breadth whatever the season, and to convert visitors' interest into bookings with municipalities, operators and producers.

The overall strategy, with audience analysis and a communication concept, was developed by our friends at Bodega Oslo. It put its finger on the real problem: the destination had more to offer than many were aware of, was easy to pass by, and lacked a clear promise that could turn interest into bookings. The overarching task became to make Telemark easier to remember, so it would be easier to choose. Our task was to translate that to the web, supported by travel statistics from Virke and Statistics Norway and by Visit Telemark's own knowledge of the destination. Three insights came to steer the website's priorities.

Inspiration before products

The strategy's creative platform, "The start of an adventure", frames Telemark as the place where modern Norway, skiing and industry began. It gave the site both its story and its voice: bold, exploring, with an eye on the narrow path and the best view.

On the web we translated that into a guiding idea: let the content be steered by the visitor's interest. When we know, or come to know, what a visitor is curious about, the site shows content built for exactly that. The visitor chooses a direction already on the start page and can filter by a wealth of broad and narrow interests.

In that work we made a deliberate decision: to remove products such as hotels, restaurants and tours from the start page. The start page's main job is to spark curiosity, inspire and show the breadth of the destination. The products reach the visitor through carefully curated articles and landing pages with themed content, once interest has been sparked.

The landing pages, which we call concept destinations, are the hub. Instead of organising the content by audience segment, we gathered it around a number of concept destinations, each built around one of the destination's clearest promises and tied to Telemark's geography. Every concept destination has a concept description and clear content themes, and these become pages and tags. In this way the content hierarchy also became the site's architecture.

The concept destinations are built around short trips and themes, for example "3-day autumn adventure in Telemark", "The Heavy Water Cellar at Vemork" and "Experience autumn on two wheels in Telemark". Each page leads on to events, accommodation and products within the theme. The editors create and curate new concept destinations for different interests, so the site can grow in step with what visitors are looking for.

Two booking systems, one experience

The products in Telemark sit in one of two booking systems: Tellus, which has long been the standard in the travel industry, and the newer booking solution GoToHub. Because different operators use different systems, both need to work and interoperate within the same website.

Our task was to make the seam invisible. The visitor should never need to know which system delivers an experience, a price or an available time. For the products in GoToHub we also built full online booking directly on the site, with package offers and real-time price and availability data. The rest of the offering is reached just as smoothly, wherever the data comes from.

The site is built headless, with WordPress as the content engine and a frontend in Next.js. That gave control over performance, structure and accessibility, while the editors could keep working in a familiar environment.

Content and form that make room

Together with the client and Bodega Oslo we shaped the website's information architecture and content structure: the concept-destination page type, the structure for experiences, places and operators, and the tagging that drives the filters and the search. A content pre-study showed where material was missing for the filters to give visitors relevant results, which gave the editorial team a clear plan for what needed to be written. A map lets visitors explore Telemark geographically and find experiences by where they are.

Visit Telemark's 15-year-old graphic profile was given a new digital application at the same time, which Bodega developed in close collaboration with our UX designers. We chose a highly legible typeface, pulled the colour palette together and secured the contrast values. The result is a calmer design where text, images and video are given room to speak.

Of course we also trained Visit Telemark's editorial team, together with Bodega, in the new editor interface, delivered a manual and optimised the interface UX copy. The method for how the articles are written was developed by Bodega, and the content is produced by Visit Telemark's editorial team and in close dialogue with the tourism operators themselves.