Sri Lanka Classical Tours

Project Overview

The Sri Lanka Classical Tours website was designed and developed by Isura Wickramarachchi in 2007 for Journey Scapes (Pvt) Limited as a dedicated website promoting Sri Lanka's cultural and heritage travel experiences. The project was developed as a static HTML website featuring a custom-designed Flash banner to create an engaging first impression while showcasing the beauty of Sri Lanka's ancient civilization and historical attractions.

This website was one of six specialised travel websites created for Journey Scapes, each targeting a different tourism category. Instead of promoting every type of tour through a single website, a separate website was developed for each niche market to improve search engine visibility and provide highly focused content for potential travellers. Journey Scapes has since grown into one of Sri Lanka's recognised inbound tour operators with decades of experience serving international visitors.

Design & Structure

The website was designed around the theme of Sri Lanka's cultural heritage.

The homepage features a warm earth-toned colour palette with brown, gold, and olive green, creating an atmosphere inspired by Sri Lanka's ancient temples and traditional architecture. A custom Flash banner displays rotating imagery representing classical Sri Lankan heritage, immediately introducing visitors to the country's rich history.

Below the banner, featured tour categories such as Wildlife Tours, Beach Holidays, and Heritage Tours are presented using attractive image panels, allowing visitors to quickly explore different travel experiences.

The layout was intentionally kept clean and lightweight, ensuring fast loading while maintaining an elegant visual identity suitable for international tourism promotion.

Unique Design Concept

The Sri Lanka Classical Tours project was developed as part of an innovative multi-website SEO strategy.

At the time, many travel companies attempted to promote every type of holiday through a single website. After analysing search engine behaviour, I recommended a different approach: creating multiple dedicated websites, each targeting a specific travel niche such as Classical Tours, Wildlife Tours, Beach Holidays, Adventure Tours, and other specialised categories.

This strategy provided several important advantages:

Each website focused on a single travel theme.
Content could be optimised for highly targeted search keywords.
Visitors found exactly the type of holiday they were searching for.
Individual websites achieved stronger rankings for their specialised topics.
The overall online visibility of the company increased significantly.

This was an advanced SEO strategy for 2007, when search engine optimisation was becoming increasingly important for tourism businesses. By concentrating each website on a specific market segment, the company was able to improve its presence on major search engines and attract more qualified international visitors.

Key Features

100% custom-designed interface.
Custom Flash banner.
Heritage-inspired visual identity.
Dedicated Classical Tours website.
Image-based tour presentation.
SEO-optimised page structure.
Fast-loading static HTML pages.
Cross-browser compatibility.

Technical Highlights

Static HTML website.
Flash banner animation.
SEO-optimised coding structure.
Tour package presentation.
Search-friendly page hierarchy.
Optimised graphics.
Cross-browser compatibility.

Significance

The Sri Lanka Classical Tours project demonstrates Isura Wickramarachchi's ability to combine creative web design with strategic digital marketing. Rather than simply developing a tourism website, this project formed part of a broader online marketing solution that transformed how Journey Scapes promoted its services on the web.

By recommending and implementing six separate niche-focused travel websites, each optimised for a different category of tourism, the project introduced a forward-thinking SEO strategy that was well ahead of its time. This approach enabled Journey Scapes to compete more effectively in organic search results while providing visitors with specialised content tailored to their travel interests.

The project remains an excellent example of how thoughtful website architecture and search engine optimisation could work together to create a stronger online presence and generate long-term marketing value for a growing international travel company.

When you entrust holidays in Sri Lanka to JourneyScapes, you can be certain that you are in the best hands. We are a well established Inbound Tour Operating specialist and our Senior Management counts several years’ expertise in the industry. Our travel consultants have travelled to every nook and cranny of our stunning country, so you can be assured that we will only recommend what we ourselves have experienced. This is why we have a distinct advantage in offering you unique tour programs at most reasonable prices.

Our connections with the hotels and all our other stakeholders are excellent, and have made us one of the leading tour operators in Sri Lanka. In fact, FTI Germany’s largest tour producer to Sri Lanka and its subsidiary companies are handled by us! And at this year’s ITB, FTI was actually honoured with the Gold Award for bringing in the highest number of German tourists to the country. We also have over 30 tour operators working with us from different parts of the world, mostly from Europe and the UK. Some of them are specialists in designer tours and cater to an affluent and discerning clientele. So we make regular reservations, and are quite aware of the needs of this customer and what is available in the market.