Double WebAward win for Zoocha: two Outstanding Websites in 2026

We are delighted to share that Zoocha has received two Outstanding Website awards at the 2026 WebAwards, recognising our work with Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and Back-Roads Touring.

Two very different organisations. Two very different audiences. One shared approach: understand the people we’re designing for, bring together the right expertise, and deliver with quality built into every stage.

Back-Roads Touring: a “sanctuary for the discerning explorer”

For Back-Roads Touring, the challenge was to translate the character of premium, off-the-beaten-track travel into an immersive digital experience, without losing sight of the practical information people need to research and book a trip.

The WebAward judges particularly recognised how successfully those two objectives come together.

They described the experience as a “perfect blend of aesthetic views, scenery, travelers in action” alongside practical tour and pricing information, creating an experience where the commercial purpose of the website becomes secondary to the feeling of discovering what a Back-Roads journey could actually be like.

The judge also highlighted how the combination of testimonials and destination imagery created an authentic sense of travel, concluding that while travel websites can often be predictable, Back-Roads had succeeded in creating a “sanctuary for the discerning explorer”.

That is particularly meaningful recognition because creating a distinctive sense of place and experience was central to the project.

Our design-thinking workshops, user testing and iterative prototyping helped us rethink the journey from inspiration through to booking, introducing richer visual interaction, itineraries and mapping while refining the booking experience.

Behind that experience sits a shared Drupal foundation designed to improve maintainability and efficiency across multiple Global Touring brands.

And the results go beyond the award. Since launch, Back-Roads Touring has recorded a 28% year-on-year increase in bookings, a 14% increase in traffic through key journey pages and a 120% uplift in conversion between customer details and payment.

Guy’s and St Thomas’: designing for complexity without making the experience complex

Creating a digital experience for Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust means representing an extraordinarily complex healthcare organisation while keeping the experience straightforward for the people who depend on it.

The platform brings together information spanning five hospitals, the Trust’s charitable foundation, its patient portal and dedicated information for healthcare professionals, while also enabling visitors to contribute directly to the foundation.

The WebAward judges recognised the challenge of bringing those different needs together:

“The site is well designed given the complexity of representing five hospitals, a foundation, a patient portal and also provides info for healthcare professionals.”

The judge also recognised an important reality of healthcare design: 

“these platforms need to work for many different people, with different health needs, circumstances and levels of confidence with technology.”

As the judge observed, healthcare websites typically “play it safe with regard to design”, and for good reason: keeping things simple matters when you are designing for such a broad and diverse audience.

That principle closely reflects the user-centred approach behind the platform.

Our Discovery work engaged more than 770 users from across the Trust’s ecosystem, including people with cognitive and physical accessibility needs. Research, testing and iterative design helped us understand what different audiences actually needed from the service and turn that complexity into a clearer, more accessible digital experience.

Receiving an Outstanding Website WebAward is fantastic recognition of what the Guy’s and St Thomas’ and Zoocha teams have achieved together.

The process behind the pixels

Awards celebrate what people see.

We’re equally proud of the expertise, processes and discipline behind what gets delivered.

Zoocha brings together specialists across strategy, research, UX and UI, accessibility, Drupal development, QA, DevOps, delivery and client services.

That multidisciplinary expertise is supported by an integrated Business Management System spanning seven independently certified ISO management standards: ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 20000-1, ISO 22301, ISO 27001, ISO 27701 and ISO 42001.

For us, those certifications are not badges that sit separately from delivery. The principles behind them influence how we manage quality, security, privacy, resilience, service delivery, sustainability and responsible technology across the organisation.

And then there is continual improvement.

Zoocha has a structured approach for turning feedback, evidence and lessons learned into action. Our Zoocha Continuous Improvement programme gives teams a formal mechanism to identify opportunities and make measurable improvements to how we work.

That combination of highly skilled people, user-centred thinking, robust processes and continual improvement helps us approach complex digital delivery with consistency and precision.

The two winning projects demonstrate that in very different ways.

For Back-Roads, it means creating a digital experience evocative enough to be described by a judge as a “sanctuary for the discerning explorer”.

For Guy’s and St Thomas’, it means taking the inherent complexity of a major healthcare organisation and creating an experience recognised by the judges as “well designed” for the challenge it has to solve.

Two Outstanding Websites. One continually improving team.

These awards belong to the people behind the work.

A huge thank you to our teams at Zoocha and, most importantly, to our partners at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Back-Roads Touring and Global Touring.

Two very different digital challenges.

Two Outstanding Website WebAwards.

And one approach built around people, quality and continual improvement.