Client: Travel with Lesley Whyte
Services: WordPress redesign, UX architecture, JetEngine dynamic data, tour booking integration, Elementor Pro build
Some websites just sit there. They exist, they load, and they leave the visitor to figure out the rest. Lesley Whyte’s site was capable of so much more, because Lesley herself is so much more. An award-winning photographer, Antarctic Ambassador, and specialist tour operator running immersive small-group experiences across the globe, she needed a website that matched the calibre of what she was actually selling.
This redesign was about making the experience of visiting the site feel as curated as one of her tours.
The first challenge was scope. Lesley doesn’t run one kind of tour — she runs five distinct travel offerings for audiences with different needs, different budgets, and different reasons for travelling. Women’s Only Tours. Women in Photography. 50+ Travel. Chatham Islands experiences. Shetland Islands journeys. Reaching from the Southern Ocean to Scotland’s northern archipelago.
A flat, one-size-fits-all navigation wouldn’t serve these audiences. The redesigned site uses a layered mega menu that surfaces each tour category at a glance, with a supporting description for each so visitors immediately understand what’s available without having to dig. The UX decision here was intentional: reduce friction at the point of discovery, because a confused visitor doesn’t book.
Each tour category lands on its own dedicated section, with clear audience positioning and a distinct visual identity within the broader brand. Lesley’s visitors aren’t all the same person, and the site stops pretending they are.
At the heart of the site is a dynamic tour listing system powered through WordPress, Elementor Pro, and JetEngine by Crocoblock. Every upcoming tour displays its dates, duration, pricing, and a direct path to booking with no hunting, no guesswork.
Pricing surfaces in multiple currencies across the listings: Australian dollars, British pounds, US dollars. Lesley’s clientele is genuinely international, and a site that speaks to a traveller in their own currency removes one more invisible barrier between browsing and booking.
Tours are grouped by category on the homepage: Coming Tours, Destinations, and travel interest, with a Browse All Tours pathway that keeps exploration intuitive.
The new-look website is honestly amazing. It has completely surpassed what I imagined possible…The flow, the structure, the elegance and the professionalism of the site now truly reflects the calibre and direction of the business. I couldn’t be happier with it.
Owner, Travel with Lesley Whyte
One of the more significant builds under the hood is the tour page template system. Every individual tour page with its itinerary, inclusions, pricing, highlights, and detailed information, is driven by dynamic data stored in JetEngine custom fields and post types. The tabbed accordion layout that organises all of that information isn’t manually built for each tour. It’s a template that pulls and displays data automatically.
This matters enormously for someone running Lesley’s kind of business. When a new tour is ready to go live, she enters the details into structured fields in the WordPress backend and the page builds itself — correctly formatted, consistently presented, nothing out of place. No calls to a developer. No wrestling with page builders. No risk of a hastily assembled tour page looking different from every other one on the site. The templated design makes efficient use of both online resources and Lesley’s time.
For a business that adds destinations and dates as opportunities arise, this isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s what keeps the site manageable over time.
Lesley’s audience is global, and booking logistics reflect that. New Zealand clients use a different booking platform from her international clientele — different currency, different system, different process.
Rather than sending visitors to a generic contact form and sorting it out manually, the tour templates detect which booking system to surface based on currency. New Zealand visitors see the local booking pathway. Everyone else sees the international one. The right experience, for the right client, without Lesley having to think about it.
It’s the kind of conditional logic that’s invisible when it works — and immediately obvious when it doesn’t. Getting it right meant thinking through the full booking journey from both sides, building the template logic cleanly, and testing it across both pathways.
Lesley has earned her authority. A winner of the Travel and Tourism Awards 2026. Antarctic Ambassador for IAATO. A photographer with credentials that stretch from the sub-Antarctic to the Arctic. The redesigned site leads with this trust architecture — award badges, accreditation logos, and her Antarctic Ambassador status are woven into the homepage, not buried in an About page.
There’s also a dedicated Meet the Team section and a full suite of policy and booking terms pages — Policies & Promises, Booking Terms & Conditions — that give serious travellers the reassurance they need before committing to a premium tour. Trust-building isn’t just about what you say. It’s about what you’ve thought to include.
One detail worth calling out: the site includes a dedicated Trade Login for travel agents, accessible from the header navigation. This is a B2B layer sitting quietly inside a predominantly B2C website, a practical piece of functionality that opens a revenue channel most tour operators leave on the table.
Getting this right required thinking about two distinct user journeys living inside the same site, and making sure neither experience felt like an afterthought.
The email subscription form on the homepage isn’t a generic “sign up for our newsletter” prompt. It asks visitors to select their preferences: General/50+ Travel, Women’s Only Tours, or Chatham Islands Tours, before subscribing. Segmented from the first touch.
This matters. A 50+ traveller and a Women in Photography participant are not going to want the same emails. By capturing preference at sign-up, Lesley can send relevant content rather than broadcasting to a list that gradually goes cold. It’s a small detail in the build. It’s a significant difference in how the relationship with a prospective client develops.
The site runs on WordPress with Elementor Pro, giving Lesley full control over her own content. Tour pages, upcoming events, destination content — she can update and add without needing a developer on speed dial every time something changes. For a sole operator running a business across multiple international markets and time zones, that independence isn’t a luxury. It’s essential.
The mobile experience is fully responsive throughout, with the navigation collapsing cleanly for smaller screens. International contact numbers — New Zealand and US — are click-to-call from mobile. The site is built to work wherever Lesley’s clients are finding it.
A website that does what Lesley does: takes something extraordinary and makes it feel immediately accessible. The site earns trust before a visitor even clicks a tour page, surfaces the right experience for the right audience, and removes every unnecessary step between inspiration and booking.
Lesley is a multi-award-winning operator with decades of expertise and a global following. Her website now reflects that.
