Basically the Singapore Tourist Board (STB) wanted to redo their site to focus on the theme of “New Asia” - heralding in a new identity for the new millineium.

So the first thing we focused on was making the look of it follow the great advertising the STB’s ad agency was promoting across the world. They wanted to express the message that Singapore is a very high-class, sophisticated tourist destination where everything is state-of-the-art. That Singapore is a great jumping-off point to the more quaint and cultural areas of Asia, but the city-state itself is as great as Paris, New York or Sydney.

I thought of several things which would make the Web site visitor get a good grasp for this presentation of Singapore. This from my learnings having worked on the Hong Kong Tourist Association. First we made animated postcard images that, depending on the time of day in Singapore, would show up on the front page. Morning would show rows of shop houses with shutters opening and pedestrian traffic beginning to build-up; in the afternoon they would see the primary shopping district of the country in all its glorious hustle and bustle; at night (as in the image on the left) there would be a crowded hawker center in Chinatown with the flickering lights of the downtown skyscrapers. That kind of thing. By showing the visitor the time in Singapore and visually describing it to them, they might feel like they were already there - in a sense. A window into the exotic world they should be visiting.

There also would have been monthly featured interviews with the local color - taxi drivers, hawkers, artists, bartenders, etc. Featured local dishes/fruits, since Singapore is famous for its culinary activities as well as virtual tours of the island, travel planners for any budget and dozens of other ideas.