Hospitality
Background
Daka needed a brand new website as part of a wider relaunch under new ownership. With restoration work underway at the camp and a major industry deadline approaching ahead of Africa’s Travel Indaba, the existing WordPress website no longer made sense to build on. It felt outdated, heavily templated, and too limited to reflect the new direction of the brand. Daka is positioned as a remote safari destination in Hwange, so the new site also needed to do a better job of bringing that sense of place, atmosphere, and experience to life online.
The goal was to create a faster, more modern website that felt visually stronger, was easier to update, and could carry the brand forward beyond launch. Just as importantly, it needed to let the photography do far more of the work, with a cleaner overall presentation and a more considered user experience.
Approach
With a tight timeline in place, the project needed to move quickly, but without compromising on quality. I started by reviewing and refining the existing content, making selective improvements where needed, and reworking the site structure to create a clearer and more considered user experience.
From there, I created a fully custom design in Figma and developed the site with a strong focus on speed, usability, and longevity. The overall direction was to clean things up, modernise the presentation, and strip away unnecessary clutter so the photography, typography, and page content had more space to breathe.
We kept the existing brand foundation, but refreshed the logo slightly and reworked the typography and overall presentation to feel cleaner, sharper, and more in step with the renewed spirit of the camp. The result was a website that could be delivered within a very short timeframe while still feeling thoughtful, polished, and ready for launch.
Mike Thorne
