Where we started.
A good destination with a website that couldn’t keep up. Great content, but hard to navigate, hard to maintain, and no help to a visitor trying to work out what to do on a rainy Tuesday.
Visit Dundee
Dundee needed more than a tourism website.
So we built the beginnings of a visitor platform: somewhere that helps people discover, plan and experience Dundee, powered by good content, local businesses and a bit of Purple Imp magic.
People. Places. Possibilities.
The short version.
- 01
The problem
The old site couldn’t show everything Dundee has to offer, or help visitors plan a trip.
- 02
The idea
Turn a content-heavy website into a platform that helps people discover, plan and experience the city.
- 03
The result
One Laravel platform with editorial, business listings, events, bus timetables and AI-assisted trip planning.
The problem behind the problem.
It wasn’t just a website. It was about connecting people, places, businesses and experiences, and making sense of a huge amount of information: content, places, what visitors actually want, and how they get around.
So we had an idea.
What if the website stopped being somewhere you read about Dundee, and became something that helped you experience it? A platform built around real visitor needs, with recommendations, trip planning and the city’s whole offering in one place.
The build.
- 01Discovery
- 02Experience & content strategy
- 03Custom Laravel platform
- 04AI-assisted recommendations
- 05Technical SEO & content
- 06Making it better
Under the bonnet
- Laravel
- PHP 8.5
- MySQL
- OpenAI
- Stripe
- Bunny CDN
- Our own servers
The receipts.
Real numbers. We counted.
- 262published articles
- 240live business listings, from 2,032 in the database
- 117published events
- 1,080bus stops and 151,660 timetabled stop times
The stuff that was hard
Migrating a lot of content, validating and de-duplicating business data, pulling multiple data sources together, making recommendations genuinely useful, and keeping it simple enough for a non-technical team to run.
What we learned
Start with real user needs, not internal structures. Great content still needs great systems. AI works best when it’s genuinely useful. And a platform mindset creates long-term value.
What’s next?
This is just the beginning: new features, smarter personalisation, deeper data and more ways to show off Dundee.
Always another idea.
More stuff like this.
Lucky Tiger
A sportsbook brand launched into a regulated, established and fiercely competitive market: website, app and the marketing to win customers.
PLZ
Scottish fantasy football, a predictor on SPFL games, live data and YouTube shows, on the web and in an app.
Money Imp
An AI-powered business operating system.