Global Kite Spots is an online travel planner for kitesurfers. Kitesurfing is heavily dependant on wind seasons and Global Kite Spots provides an index of windy locations for each month. When you know where to go you can learn more about the spots in spot guide section of the site.

Global Kite Spots launched in 2013 as a side project, quickly put together on a Wordpress template. Four years later the idea had proven successful and the site had grown organically to see over 4000 visitors per month - a fairly good number for a niched site.

With increased interest shown from local businesses I thought there was an opportunity to take Global Kite Spots to the next level and introduce a business model based on local ads displayed for each region. In order to do so I needed to update the experience and make it a more useful and delightful place for visitors, and a more attractive place to be seen at for advertisers.

Visual facelift and more focus on imagery content, without sacrificing performance

Make site fully responsive and mobile-friendly

Prepare for direct ad sales business model

Global Kite Spots is made completely with Wordpress templates and plugins. I don’t write code and had to rely on what’s available out-of-the-box.

Thankfully the Wordpress plugin library is massive and I could reach a result good enough for launch without compromising too much on the initial intent.

The new site launched in October 2017 and has since gone through a content assessment, resulting in a set of new regions being added.

Visitors and usage statistics are being monitored closely and is looking good so far and the next step in the growth plan is to actively reach out to potential advertisers. As a designer this is the biggest challenge for me as I have to put on a sales hat. This is a big step out of my comfort zone, but as we all know, this is the only place where true growth can happen.