The City of London Corporation is the governing body of the Square Mile, dedicated to a vibrant and thriving City. In May 2022 the Corporation outlined a package of measures designed to boost the vibrancy of this unique area of London, under the title “Destination City”. The strategy includes a major new destination brand and website, with the aim of boosting the Square Mile’s position as a global leisure destination.

IXN and branding agency Anatomy were tasked with creating a comprehensive digital strategy and website for the City of London Corporation's new Destination City brand.

IXN adopts a data-driven approach, which ensures our solutions are precisely aligned with the audience. Building on analytics data from the existing website we gained valuable insights into user behaviour and need, which enabled us to craft a tailored web strategy for the new site.  

By benchmarking against competitor websites, we designed a solution establishing the Destinations City website as a sector leader in both usability and performance, guaranteeing that website visits translate into visitor footfall.  The approach is ‘mobile first’ to meet the needs of the majority of visitors, but also gracefully adapts to whatever device the visitor is using.

As digital specialists, we are not limited by the technology, and hence were able to integrate many advanced features into the site, such as custom mapping designs and components, a complex information taxonomy and hierarchy, newsletter sign up and interaction animations throughout.  Armed with our comprehensive strategy, Anatomy were then able to produce effective UX designs for us to build the framework of the website.

The Destination City website launched on 20 June 2023,  with City of London Corporation’s Policy Chairman, Chris Hayward, stating that the new brand and website will play a key role in making the City of London a “thriving, seven-day-a-week destination, powering the City’s recovery”, driving footfall and spend, and future economic vitality.

Since launch, the site has had strong organic traffic and achieved all of its targets on dwell time, bounce rate and most importantly, conversions into footfall. Our continuous improvement strategy means analytics are regularly reviewed and improvements to the site  are implemented, to ensure  The site continues delivering in accordance with the client’s strategic aims.