The Lost Gardens of Heligan website
In 2022, the Lost Gardens of Heligan embarked on an ambitious project to renew its website, alongside updating their Ticketing and CRM systems.
“The Semantic team have been fantastic throughout our project, delivering a brilliant new website with enthusiasm, technical precision and dedicated customer support. We’re looking forward to phase two and launching an integrated booking system in the future.”
- Rebecca Miles
Heligan is one of the most mysterious estates in England. Lost to the brambles of time since the outbreak of WW1, this Sleeping Beauty was re-awakened in 1990 to become Europe’s largest garden restoration project. Today Heligan’s 200 acres are a paradise for the explorer, wildlife, plant lover and garden romantic.
This is largely thanks to Tim Smit, music producer and archeologist who stumbled through a broken door into a garden untouched for 70 years. What followed was a breathtaking and painstaking restoration of one of the UK’s finest horticultural gardens, near Mevagissey on Cornwall’s South Coast.
The gardens now welcome over 354,000 annual visitors, and post pandemic felt that the time was right to level up their online presence.
The brief for the website project was to deliver an intuitive, fast and mobile first site that was an easy place to get visitors excited about visiting, plan a trip, book tickets find out more about events and the story of the Lost Gardens.
The new site has helped to transform Heligan's online capabilities, with features including...
- A visually appealing design that incorporates high quality photographs and a soft colour palette.
- Comprehensive information about the history, restoration and main features of the gardens
- Calls to action to book tickets, memberships and attend special events.
- Designed with a mobile-first layout ensuring that the site looks great and functions well on any device
- Gardens timeline highlighting all of the key milestones in the history of the gardens.
- Calendar of events which is regularly updated to incorporate highlights such as activities, tours and exhibitions in the gardens.
- A range of educational resources including information about the plants and animals in the gardens, as well as gardening tips and advice.
- Designed with Accessibility in mind with features such as alt tabs for images, keyboard navigation and high contrast text options.
- Help Centre and contact form capabilities allows visitors to get in touch with the Lost Gardens team, ask questions and provide feedback.