Case study 05 · Toerbroers

Fifty tours and a tourism campus, rebuilt into one site.

Toerbroers runs close to a hundred departures a year and trains the next generation of tour guides. The old website had all of it somewhere — but a traveller had to dig for a date or a price, and the campus was buried among the tours.

50
Tours, each on its own page
87
Departures on the year schedule
5
Campus courses with brochures
44
Magazine pages, readable on the site
The client

Who is Toerbroers?

An Afrikaans tour operator founded by Andries Hendrik Potgieter and Wiaan Fourie, running close to a hundred local and international tours a year — from Kruger weekends and flower tours to Zanzibar, Norway and New York. Alongside the tours sits the Toerbroers Kampus, a practical tourism school with courses in culture, nature, animal care, game farm management and a Zanzibar programme. Two businesses, one brand, and one website that had to carry both.

The challenge

What was wrong with the old site?

The content was all there. The problem was finding it. A traveller who wanted to know when the next tour left, and what it cost, had a long way to scroll — and the campus, a separate business with separate customers, was treated as just another tour.

One very long homepage

Tours, the campus, the magazine, certificates, awards and sixteen YouTube videos, stacked one after another with nothing leading.

A heavy video hero

The first screen was a looping background video with animated lettering — slow to load on a phone, and it said very little about what was on offer.

Tours without a common shape

Every tour page was laid out differently, so comparing dates, inclusions and prices across two trips meant reading both from top to bottom.

Local and international mixed up

The tour categories had drifted — a Serengeti safari filed as a local tour, others not filed at all — and the campus courses sat in the same list.

The year lived in a PDF

The full departure schedule was a printed brochure. Useful to download, but no help to someone scanning for a free weekend in March.

A brand lost in translation

English visitors using the translate button saw the name turned into “Tour Brothers” — in the page title, the headings and the logo text.

Before & after

What actually changed?

The rebuilt Toerbroers website: a sunset safari hero with two clear routes, to the tours and to the campus
The old Toerbroers website: a looping video hero with animated lettering over the Pantheon in Rome
Before After
Drag the handle, or use the arrow keys. Left is the old site, right is the rebuild. Same screen size, same first view.
The approach

What did the rebuild change?

The first screen now asks one question — are you here for a tour, or for the campus? — and everything behind it was rebuilt so the answer takes a click, not a scroll. The tour descriptions, dates and prices came from Toerbroers’ own flyers and brochures; our job was the structure they sit in.

One layout for every tour

Duration, departure dates, what is included and what is not, the deposit and the prices — always in the same place, followed by a photo gallery.

Every tour moved across

Over fifty tours migrated from the old site with their photos, then filed as local or international by where they actually go.

Photos sharpened

Thirty tour heroes and every page banner were upscaled from heavily compressed originals, so a full-width photo no longer looks smeared.

The year on one page

A skedule of 87 departures, grouped by month in the brochure’s own order, with the full PDF still a click away.

A home for the campus

Kampus and its syllabus pages: five courses, each with its duration, a summary and its own downloadable brochure.

The magazine, readable

The Toerbroers Atlas opens as a page-turning flipbook on the site itself — 44 pages, loaded as you read, with the PDF to keep.

And underneath: the name is protected from the translate button, so English visitors read Toerbroers everywhere; the whole site had an Afrikaans spelling pass; and the old tour and page addresses redirect to their new homes, so links in years of Facebook posts still land somewhere useful.

The result

What does success look like here?

The site is newly live, so there is no before-and-after traffic figure yet, and we would rather leave the space empty than fill it with a guess. What can be measured today is what a visitor can do: find any tour’s dates and price in two clicks, see the whole year on one page, and reach the campus without wading through the tours to get there. When the numbers have had a season to settle, they will go on this page.

See it for yourself: toerbroers.co.za. The other case studies are on the case studies page, and the full list of what we have built is on our work.

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