Case Study: Storybrand website on wordpress for Manta Ray Advocates, Hawaii
I (Sandrine) had been working closely with Martina at Manta Ray Advocates for a while and we had already reviewed some of her content when I became a Storybrand Guide in February 2021.
So we were thrilled when two years later, she asked us to rebuild her website on Divi! This would allow us to not only review her copy to make it more impactful, but also restructure the website for better SEO and user experience - and (last but not least)
Creating a WordPress Staging Site
While Sandrine worked with Martina to get the copy “just right”, Mellissa started building a “staging site”: this would allow us to build the website and get full approval from Martina, so we could then replace the live website with the site we’d built.
Applying Storybrand Principles to the Website
When someone’s passionate about what they do, it’s not always straightforward to capture that passion into words and design. Sandrine worked with Martina to clarify her message and organise her content, without losing any of its significance - and enhancing its impact and readability.
Screenshot from the old website
The Website’s Look & Feel
Manta ray viewings in Hawaii almost always take place at night, when the mantas come to feed on plankton that’s attracted by underwater spotlights. Martina and James Wing are both professional videographers, with just one issue… most of their footage and pictures were taken at night, making the old website look dark and depressing.
Instead, we sourced high-quality images and video materials to brighten up the website - and reflect the true magic of the manta rays.
Mellissa also hand-drew little manta rays to add movement to the website.
Once we got approval on the “look and feel” of the homepage by Martina, Mellissa could proceed to build the rest of the pages in the same style.
What a difference with the new website…
The Manta Ray Library
The team at Manta Ray Advocates had also been registering and tracking manta ray appearances, injuries, and other data for decades. This “manta ray library” was hidden in a corner of the website, and individual manta ray pages hardly got any visitors.
On the new website, the library index now contains “cards” with the manta’s picture and main characteristics. We added categories, so you can now view the mantas by sex, species, and others.
We also redesigned the individual pages so they’d include video footage and a photo carousel of the manta ray, as well as stories about their name, appearances, injuries, and more. Ederly carefully organised the information and added images and details to each page.
And another fun feature - from now on, each manta ray’s page shows what blog post the manta was featured in.
Since then, both team members and guests have been sharing stories about the manta ray’s they’d encounter on manta ray snorkeling adventures in the page comments.
The Manta Ray Advocates Blog
The blog was another big project to tackle. The SmartAlpaca team had helped Martina write and publish incredibly valuable information consistently for years, leading to a huge increase in traffic. This rebuild finally gave us the chance to update categories and category pages, tags, off-brand imagery, and more. Not only was there a noticeable boost in traffic after we published the website,
Old page above, new page on the right
Sales page for the book
One of the most fun pages to work on was that for Martina’s children’s book, “Notch, the Rescued Dolphin”. While the old page focused on the making of the book and the event (and viral video) it was based on, Mellissa got to work with actual illustrations from the book - bringing Notch and his marine friends to life like never before.
The cherry on top? Over a year after we published the site, Martina is still in awe of her “new” website.
