Visithasselt.be: Website of Taste

The challenge

Hasselt is the Capital of Taste. That’s Taste with a capital T. The ideal spot for bons vivants pur sang but just as ideal a place to be for the perfect city break. The hip shops and trendy boutiques, the Jenever and the Fashion Museums, the ‘Taste Route’, the Japanese Garden and, well, the list just goes on and on. Truly Limburg's finest.

There's certainly no lack of highlights in Hasselt. It's just a matter of figuring out which ones to catch. With a visually appealing, but more importantly, a very user-friendly site. Exactly what the city was looking for.

Since 2014, Wunderkraut has been closely involved in the development of a completely new platform for Hasselt's city websites. In cooperation with a partner in the sector, and in addition to Hasselt, for the city of Leuven, too.

The update to visithasselt.be – the previous site was outdated and rather difficult to maintain – was part of this digital transformation. The website, in its current form, stands as an example for the city for all its other projects.

Thanks to our extensive technical expertise in the construction of web platforms using Drupal CMS systems and services rendered as a sustainable IT partner providing customised solutions, Wunderkraut was awarded the project. And off we went.

600,000

visitors annually

to tourist sites & attractions

40,000

day-trippers

per day

Ultimate

city break

in Limburg and beyond

Text color

#C0C0C0 1

The solution

Focus on the tourists

visithasselt.be is entirely focused on visitors to Hasselt. Besides the city's official site, there is now also a separate site whose primary function is to entice users to come discover (and taste) Hasselt's treasures. With its sights trained on tourists, schools, business people etc.

Our partner, Internet Architects, handled the visuals, and we at Wunderkraut took care of the technical implementation.

Centralised contact / practical information

On both the city website, hasselt.be, and the new site, visithasselt.be, you can find info about the city's wealth of tourist attractions. This significant overlap of practical information – for example, for the various museums – called for centralised content.

So instead of maintaining separate content, Wunderkraut came up with an innovative solution: centralised contact pages for all City of Hasselt websites. Not originally part of the plan but, in fact, tactically necessary. This way the content remains separate, but there is one consistent page with practical information for all of the websites.

Task-oriented design

The site has been constructed so that you can easily navigate in 2 directions. In the one direction via various themes, such as shopping, tasting, spending the night or holding meetings. In the other direction, it is possible to select information per target audience: schools, companies, youth, singles … So, everyone finds the information they need, quickly and directly. User-friendliness reigns!

Flexible self-administration

The new website not only has to be easy for the visitor to navigate. The personnel at the city's Tourism Office must also work with it every day. So, we paid extra attention behind the scenes to ease-of-maintenance and manageability, for example, of certain campaigns or current topics. This way the personnel have all the freedom and control they need over their own site.

Training, hosting & support

The visithasselt.be website finally went live on 1 September. It goes without saying that Wunderkraut assisted the city's Tourism Office personnel with training and advice. The same applies in the future for continued hosting and post-launch care.

Young man visiting a city and studying a map