An awards programme that airlines and government missions have to take seriously
The client
The World Hajj and Umrah Convention Awards recognise industry honours across airlines, hotels, tour operators and government missions. The people entering are national carriers and government bodies, which sets the bar for how the website has to look and behave.
The brief
An international awards programme needs a site that institutional entrants will trust: credible, formal and unambiguous, with nomination paths nobody has to guess at. It also needs correspondence that works, because a nomination email that does not arrive is an entry that never existed.
What we did
- Restrained, formal design that reads as institutional rather than promotional, because the audience is not one you win over with enthusiasm.
- Clear categories and nomination paths so an entrant knows exactly what they are applying for and what happens next.
- Managed email so nominations and official correspondence arrive and get answered, run the same way as their sister organisation.
- Search work and ongoing management, on the same retainer as Hajj People.
The result
Running on ongoing monthly management, with the site, the email and the search handled as one service rather than three things nobody has time for.
What formal actually means here
Designing for institutional entrants is mostly a matter of restraint. A government mission deciding whether to submit an entry is not looking for energy, gradients or a countdown timer. They are looking for evidence that this is a real programme run by real people, that the categories are defined, that somebody will read what they send, and that the whole thing will still exist next year.
So the design does less on purpose. Clear type, plenty of space, no decoration doing work that the information should be doing. The credibility comes from the structure being unambiguous rather than from the page being impressive.
Nominations are the whole funnel
For an awards programme the website has exactly one conversion, and it is a nomination. Everything else on the site exists to get somebody to the point of making one, and every ambiguity between the homepage and the form is an entry that quietly does not happen.
So the categories are stated plainly, each one says who it is for, and the path from reading about a category to entering it is short enough that nobody has to email and ask.
Services used
Website design and build · SEO and search visibility · Digital marketing and strategy
