Travel, Spec Website
Gloucester HarborWalk
This city-sponsored attraction takes visitors on a journey through Gloucester’s waterfront and historic downtown district. The free, self-guided tour includes 42 stops where visitors can scan a QR code to learn more about the town’s rich history. The user-friendly website shares information on tour stops, helps users navigate the harborwalk, and helps visitors plan their trip to Gloucester, MA.
The Key Facts About This Travel Website
The City of Gloucester wanted to support its popular walking tour with an interactive, mobile-friendly web experience and they turned to inConcert Web Solutions to make it happen. Starting with a strategic spec, inConcert and the City of Gloucester collaborated to plan the ideal user experience for their visitors. The new site showcases custom location pages for the 42 historic tour stops, features a real-time mapping system that provides walking directions, and leans into the power of content diversity with custom media cards.

Specs Set the Stage
The project started with a website spec, a document that details all aspects of the website before development begins. With a shared understanding of HarborWalk’s target audience and goals, the inConcert team could plan functionality, content, information architecture, and wireframes to create a clear blueprint for development.

All About Location
A custom interactive map leverages location data from users’ mobile devices. This feature provides real-time directions to each of the 42 historical locations along the HarborWalk. Visitors can then scan the on-site QR code or access the tour stop page from the map. Plus, visitors can use the map ahead of time to more effectively plan their trip.

Instagram-worthy Sights
To promote interaction and social proof, an integrated Instagram feed displays posts tagged with #GloucesterHarborWalk directly on the homepage. Site admins can block any inappropriate content, so the team can rest assured the site has up-to-date, engaging visual content without the worry that comes with user-generated content.
Gloucester Harborwalk: Promoting Exploration Through Interactive Website Design

The Challenge and Solution of Gloucester HarborWalk
The Challenge
Improving Interaction
With a static, outdated website that was showing its age, the City of Gloucester wanted to improve the overall user experience with a focus on encouraging tourists to visit more tour stops. After securing a grant to fund the website redesign, they engaged inConcert Web Solutions and set out to improve interaction, make the site more engaging for HarborWalk users, and encourage visitors to visit multiple stops on the tour — all while staying within a specific budget.






The Solution
Bringing History to Life
Starting with a detailed spec to plan the ideal user experience for tour visitors, the new site prioritized interaction and engagement. From the interactive map to the Instagram feed to the media cards, our team added engagement at every turn ensuring site visitors feel connected to the tour and have opportunities to share their own experiences. In addition, our team of content creators developed engaging content, tapping into the explorer in all of us, ready to set out on an adventure.
The Results
The custom, interactive website is giving Gloucester a modern way to share their history. The site is seeing increases in new users, views and events triggered in less than one year.
6K
New Users
14K
Pageviews
42K
Event Triggers
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