Custom Website Redesign for MyAfrica
From brand-led design to a fully custom-coded WordPress theme, I built My Africa a digital home that captures the energy of the African bush and makes booking a safari effortless.
Client
Skill-set utilised
- Discovery and brand-alignment workshops with the My Africa team
- UI/UX redesign for a photo- and video-led visitor experience
- Custom WordPress theme development built from scratch (no page-builder bloat)
- Custom post types and templates for Safaris, Tours, Tented Camps and Activities
- Third-party booking integration (Activitar) for real-time availability and online payments
- Dynamic content components: reviews, Instagram feed, newsletter sign-up, partner logos
- Responsive, performance-optimised front-end build across all devices
website URL
industry
Tourism / Safari & Travel
project brief
Redesign a Custom Digital Home for an African Safari Operator
My Africa needed a website that could do two things at once: sell the emotion of a safari and make the logistics of booking one simple. Operating out of Hoedspruit with a growing catalogue of game drives, multi-day tours, tented camps and adventure activities, they needed a platform built to organise a wide, fast-changing product range without losing its sense of place.
Their site needed to support several distinct content types — day safaris, multi-day tours, tented camps, activities and a car rental offering — each with its own pricing, imagery and booking flow, while still feeling like one cohesive brand from the homepage down.
My role was to redesign and build a fully custom WordPress theme from the ground up, structured around flexible, reusable templates that let the My Africa team list new experiences easily, while giving visitors a fast, visual, mobile-first way to browse and book.
Challenges & Objectives
My Africa’s offering spans safaris, multi-day tours, tented camps, activities like quad biking and ziplining, and car rental — each needing its own layout, pricing display and calls to action. A generic template-based site couldn’t do justice to that range without becoming cluttered or slow.
The project objectives were to design a custom theme that reflected the energy and warmth of the My Africa brand, built product-specific templates for every experience type, and integrate seamlessly with Activitar for live booking and payment. The site also needed to surface social proof — reviews, Instagram content and partner credibility — throughout, without turning every page into a wall of text.
The result needed to be fast, fully responsive, and easy for the My Africa team to manage and expand as new tours, camps and seasonal packages are added.
Our approach
01
Strategy & Brand Alignment
I started with a discovery phase to understand My Africa’s audience, product range and booking behaviour, mapping out how safaris, tours, camps and activities needed to relate to one another across the site. This shaped a content structure that could scale as the business grows.
02
UI/UX Design
I redesigned a visual, image-first interface built around large photography and video, clear pricing, and star ratings, so visitors could browse safaris and tours the way they’d browse a menu, quickly, visually, and with a clear next step every time.
03
Custom WordPress Theme Build
I built a fully custom WordPress theme from scratch, with dedicated templates for Safaris, Tours, Tented Camps and Activities. Each template was redesigned to handle its own pricing, imagery and booking logic while sharing a consistent visual language across the site.
04
Booking Integration & Dynamic Content
I integrated the Activitar booking system directly into the theme for real-time availability and online payment, and built out dynamic components including a TripAdvisor-style review section, an Instagram feed, a newsletter sign-up and a partner-logo showcase, keeping the site feeling current and trustworthy.
Key Deliverables
- Discovery and brand-alignment workshops with the My Africa team
- Custom UI/UX redesign across Safaris, Tours, Tented Camps and Activities
- Fully custom-coded WordPress theme built without reliance on page builders
- Custom post types and templates for each experience category
- Activitar booking and payment integration for real-time online bookings
- Dynamic review, Instagram feed, newsletter and partner-logo components
- Responsive redesign implementation across desktop, tablet and mobile
- Quality assurance, performance optimisation and launch support
The final website redesign delivered the following results:
A visually rich, custom-built platform that reflects My Africa’s brand and captures the feeling of an African safari from the first scroll
A flexible content structure across safaris, tours, camps and activities that makes it easy for the team to list and update experiences
Seamless online booking through direct Activitar integration, reducing friction between browsing and paying
Stronger social proof and trust signals, with reviews, Instagram content and travel-partner logos woven throughout the site
A fast, responsive, mobile-first experience built to convert browsers into bookings across every device