Copenhagen Business School: Building a sense of place

Well-planned virtual tours draw in a site’s target audiences.

The Site

Copenhagen Business School, one of Europe’s largest with 14,000 students, has a Campus Life section which provides virtual tours of the school’s facilities. There are three main tours, each centred on a discrete part of the campus and accessed from an introduction page that gives brief descriptions of each site along with a link to its tour.

Following the link leads to a page with a central image panel in which a 360-degree panorama is playing. Beneath the screen are options for other views (for example, Canteen, Auditorium, Student café) and a simple navigation to stop the display, or go forward or back. An Instruction panel to the right details how to use your computer mouse as an alternative means of navigation. A link to the Java plug-in needed to run the tour is also provided.

The Takeaway

Virtual tours are one of the web features enjoying a surge in popularity on the back of the spread of broadband connectivity. Americans alone take 5 million ‘trips’ a day, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, an increase of almost 3 million since 2004, with 51 per cent of all internet users claiming to have made at least one virtual visit. Most, of course, will be virtual ’trips’ to holiday destinations, public places, museums and other tourist attractions. But Copenhagen Business School shows how companies and organisations can use virtual tours to draw in their own target audiences. In Copenhagen’s case this is mainly potential students, but also employees – the introduction explicitly invites visitors to see “what it is like to be a student or employee at CBS”.

The school’s tour feature is invitingly presented, with a well-scripted introduction, user instructions and varied menu options drawing in site visitors and then building a strong visual impression of the campus and its ambience. Company recruiters, who generally do little to sell their facilities and locations, take note of the free lesson.

First published on 30 November, 2006