Fota Wildlife Park Releases

Say Hello to FOTABOOK a New Way to Interact with Fota Wildlife Park

The Ring Tailed Lemurs at Fota Wildlife Park in Cork were busy this morning launching their new look website www.fotawildlife.ie

The new look site has been designed around the main objectives of the park i.e conservation, education and fun. The result being that the site now offers the visitor interaction with the park before, during and after their visit.

This is done through new features to help tourists such as the ‘How to Find Us’ tool which gives detailed directions from all main access points into Ireland and they have also introduced a ‘Things to do in Cork’ section which looks at Family Trips, City Breaks and Weekend Adventures in the area. The site also helps the visitor to discover a bit more about parks conservation work, not just here in Ireland but throughout the world with its many partners and the site also gives a comprehensive look at the animals including their Fota Connection which concentrates on how the animals are linked specifically to Fota Wildlife Park.

Speaking about the new site Head of Marketing for Fota Wildlife Park Stephen Ryan believes that interaction is key to communicating with the public “we have built this site to make it easy for our visitors to find out about us through meaningful content, to discover what we have to offer through fantastic imagery and more importantly to find out what other people say about us through our unique interactive tool FOTABOOK”.

FOTABOOK is one aspect of the new-look Fota Wildlife Park website, and has taken the art of creating conversations online to the next level. Establishing a sense of community for users was an early objective for the Park's old site, built in 2009, and customised guestbooks, a Members Login area and our Ask Larry section helped to achieve that. 

Times have changed though, and the Park now presents FOTABOOK - the organic evolution of those community ambitions. The technology was developed in-house by StudioForty9 to facilitate Fota in organising and monitoring their social network feeds in one place, expanding our knowledge of the online 'buzz' about the Park and encouraging conversation on the website without forcing a new medium on our visitors.

Developer of the site Gerard Keohane from StudioForty9 believes that “Fotabook will quickly become a collection of the best tweets, photographs and videos posted on the web by visitors to the Park”. He further added “few people arrive at Fota Wildlife Park without a camera or smartphone, and everybody loves to have their say online, the new website will gather this visitor-generated content, share it with the rest of the world and give their visitors a central home online.