The Wildwood Trust opened in 1999 as a centre of excellence, dedicated to the conservation of British Wildlife. The Trust currently runs two wildlife parks, one in Canterbury, Kent and one in Escot in Devon. Wildwood houses over 200 native animals, both past and present. The parks are set in beautiful ancient woodland where visitors can see bears, wolves, bison, deer, owls, foxes, red squirrels, wild boar and many more UK species.

Wildwood is one of the UK’s leading animal charities, and is dedicated to protecting, conserving and rewilding Britain's wildlife.

The objective of the website project was to bring Wildwood to life online by delivering a clear and visually appealing layout, using high quality images and videos to help showcase animals that would work equally well on desktop and mobile devices, creating an engaging experience for the user. Equally, the backoffice CMS had to be intuitive and easy to use for the Wildwood team.

We have just launched the Wildwood Trust and Park websites with Semantic. We have been so impressed. The whole process was professional, calm and friendly. Neil, James and Dan reassured us, supported us and made the whole, somewhat daunting process, a pleasure. We are thrilled with our new sites and look forward to future collaborations!
- Sam Scott, Wildwood

Easy to use navigation makes it easy to find information about the various attractions and activities offered at Wildwood. The site also includes search facilities, social media links and a newsletter sign up facility.

It incorporates a number of “attraction specific” features built in to LOOP such as multi-location navigation, langing pages, filters, listings, directions, opening calendars, maps and more. Given the features and level of design apparent in the site, the amazing point to consider is that it is built on Semantic’s LOOP platform.

By building on our suite of pre-built components, LOOP has allowed us to rapidly build the core site, saving time and money. The high degree of customisation has allowed Wildwood to build a polished and engaging site but also allows them to add further features, pages and even locations as they grow and evolve.

As a scalable platform, there is no concern over visitor volumes to the site nor adding locations in the future. Similarly, LOOP is designed with SEO in mind, improving rankings and visibility. The ongoing LOOP subscription that Semantic will provide will help to ensure that this remains the case in the future.

The speed and low cost build has allowed Wildwood more scope to focus on other key areas such as Booking Experiences and Memberships. Alongside the website project, Wildwood ambitiously also implemented Access Gamma as their ticketing, POS and accounting solution. We've seamlessly integrated the booking and CRM API into a custom dedicated bookings site alongside LOOP which has allowed us to build a streamlined booking process for visitors. Users can easily purchase tickets, memberships and make future reservations directly from the website without having to navigate to a separate ticketing system. Visitors see realtime availability and can make bookings quickly and securely.

Semantic were integral in translating our new EPOS and CRM systems into a functioning website. Their team's knowledge of user experience workflow and API integration, combined with a calm methodical approach, enabled Wildwood to achieve a ridiculous timeline for launching a new website with minimal bugs and issues. Would heartily recommend Neil, James, Dan and the team!
- Dan Farrow, Wildwood

The seamless nature of the booking process using the same designs as the main LOOP website is likely to increase online performance for Wildwood due to being a faster, easier-to-use booking journey and incorporating upselling of experiences and merchandise.

Overall, the strategy for Wildwood has provided immediate dividends, levelling up the online appearance, delivering a CMS that can keep pace with the team's marketing requirements, and a more efficient and user friendly booking and purchasing process increasing visitor numbers and revenues.

‍