The flight isthe safari.

Dear Torben and Simon,

[PERSONAL: the opening line, from Matthew. No personal connection is on file; add one if there is one, or open with the next paragraph.]

My formative professional years were spent where hospitality and technology overlap: I built the in-room systems at the Four Seasons Istanbul, and these days I design and build websites from Dürrenäsch, in Aargau, though high school in Kenya means the country has a permanent claim on me. Which is how, after looking at scenicairsafaris.com recently, I ended up doing something presumptuous: I rebuilt it.

scenic.by.wrketc.app — it isn't linked from anywhere, and search engines won't index it.

It's a working draft built from your own photographs, itineraries and factsheets, to modern standards: fast on a phone, in five languages, each of the eight flying safaris on its own page with the route drawn on a map and the days laid out one by one, and the twenty scenic flights on one page with their prices. That price list is something nobody else at Wilson publishes, and today it sits in pop-ups. I don't think the current site does Scenic justice; the attached proposal says why, plainly, what the new site does, and what it would cost, with a note on how we'd look after it afterwards.

On a 100-point technical SEO check, your current site scores 76; the new one scores 90 as it stands, ahead of the other Kenyan safari air operators we checked (63 to 79). That is not a ranking, but it is the part of a ranking a website controls.

I'm building up our aviation work in East Africa, and I've priced this well under our usual rate in exchange for a case study. If you have twenty minutes for a call, I'll walk you through the site and the numbers. Anyone from reservations or operations is very welcome to join.

Asante sana, Matthew

Deliberately small

One person you can call, a bench of specialists brought in when a project needs them, and a way of building that lets a site of this size be delivered in weeks rather than months and maintained for years without a rebuild. WRK Etc. is run by Matthew Herren from Dürrenäsch, in the canton of Aargau.

Hospitality, technology, Kenya

Before the studio, Matthew built the in-room control systems at the Four Seasons Istanbul and, earlier, was named to the MIT Technology Review's TR35 list of young innovators for EduVision, which delivered textbooks by satellite to schools in Africa. He grew up in Africa and went to school in Kenya.

What we build

Fast, content-managed websites on a component system of our own that we reuse across projects; e-commerce on headless platforms for brands in Europe and East Africa; and the hosting, monitoring and month-to-month care of those sites afterwards. Recent work includes headless commerce stores for fashion brands and a prepaid smart-meter product with M-Pesa integration.

How we work

• We write the copy as well as the code; a good site is mostly words and pictures in the right order
• Every fact on the site comes from you, a public register or the manufacturer, and we say which; where we weren't sure, we asked rather than guessed
• We build on a system we already own, so a project starts at page one, and your site inherits every improvement we make to it
• We stay: the retainer is how most of our client relationships actually look

The safaris are one level too deep

The eight flying safaris are the product, and they sit under Flying With Us → Bespoke Flying Safaris, with a separate index and a home carousel of the same eight. The twenty priced scenic flights, a list nobody else at Wilson publishes, are in pop-ups a search engine can't read.

Prices live only in PDFs

The only price on a web page is the Southbound's “From US$2,245 pppd”. The rest are in brochures, and the Endangered Species one sits under a table “valid from 01 Apr 2020 – 31 Oct 2021”. An agent comparing you with another fly-in operator at night on a phone gives up before the PDF opens.

The day-by-day goes nowhere

Every itinerary day links to a page that returns “not found”: 68 of them. Out of Africa, Suguta and Rubondo have no day-by-day at all. The Omo page carries two different trips (a ten-day flying safari in the header and brochure, a thirteen-day road tour in the days). Out of Africa starts in Nairobi and in Mombasa on the same page.

The theme's demo is still live

The site is built on a yacht-charter theme, and /our-crew/ still shows its demo: “Nautical Company”, “Meet our Crew”, placeholder Latin and “No posts were found”. “Lorem Ipsum Dolor Title” is the description of the images across the itinerary cards, and a heading on the Southbound page. The five journal posts carry the headlines of real press articles over placeholder text.

Things that promise and don't work

The cost calculator says “Coming Soon” while two pages invite visitors to “Calculate Now”. “Read more” on Private Air Safaris, a card on the home page and two Resource Hub links lead to missing pages; the Omo “Discover” link goes to “http://omo”. The FAQ offers Skype; the footer says © 2025. Each is small; together they tell a visitor that nobody is looking.

Your own figures disagree

The PC-12 factsheet says 11 passengers and 900 nm; the web page says 6 to 8 and 1,565 nm (its type certificate allows 9). The Caravan carries 11 on the aircraft page, 10 in the FAQ, 8 to 10 in the itineraries and 9 on the shared-seat site. Agents copy these numbers into their own proposals.

No map, no strips, no times

“Over 150 airstrips” is a sentence. The question guests and lodges actually ask, can you land near us and how long does it take, isn't answered anywhere, and Vipingo, your home base on the coast, appears only as an address.

No privacy notice

“T&C's” and “Privacy Policy” in the footer aren't links, and the forms collect names, emails and phone numbers. Kenya's Data Protection Act (2019) expects a privacy notice where they do.

Slow, and hard to find

We scored your site, the new one and eight other Kenyan safari air operators on the same 100-point technical checklist (30 Sep 2026). Yours scores 76, fifth of nine; the others range from 63 to 79. What holds it back, in the checklist's words:

• Performance 51 out of 100 on a phone: the main image or text appears after 24.9 seconds, and a page weighs 9.5 MB
• 12 of 23 pages have no description (the FAQ among them), so Google writes its own snippet from whatever text it finds
• The security certificate is sent without its intermediate certificate, so some phones, browsers and tools can't verify it and refuse the site
• From Kenya, the server takes 0.6 s to start answering and a full request 1.05 s (target: 0.25 s)
• One language only: nothing for German, French or Italian guests and agents searching in their own language

Flying safaris come first

First in the navigation and on the home page: eight tiles with the days, the countries and the from-price with its basis, and an index map with all eight routes, filterable by country and length.

Every safari, as a flight

One template for all eight: the route drawn on a map in your livery's two stripes with the Caravan flying along it, each leg with its strip and your own flight time; the days as slides you scroll through; the camps; the aircraft and its seat map; prices and dates as a rate sheet; what's included and what to know before you go. The 68 old day addresses land on the right day.

Prices on the page, with their basis

“From US$2,245 per person per day, minimum 4 guests” on the page, not in a PDF. Each price is written once in the content system, so the new season is one change, in every language. The expired ones say “on request” until you give us the new figures.

Scenic flights, as a rate sheet

Twenty flights on one page, grouped by region, each with its time in the air, price per aircraft and where it's available; every one bookable from the page.

Where do you want to wake up?

The first thing on the home page is a search: type a camp or a lodge and it answers with the nearest strip and roughly how long the flight is from Wilson. Where we fly maps Wilson, Vipingo and Lewa, and the atlas gives every strip the itineraries name its own page: elevation, runway, time from Wilson, the camps it serves and the safaris that land there.

The Grand Caravan EX, properly

Aircraft & pilots opens with the EX and its Oasis cabin: side, top and front drawings in your livery, the seat map (eight seats and the divan), the specifications with your figures and the manufacturer's side by side and labelled, then the Caravan, the 206 and the PC-12, and the pilots with their hours.

How we fly, not how safe we are

A new page for agents and corporate clients that describes practice: who flies, their hours and training, loads and weather, tracking, operations and maintenance. It makes no record claim of any kind; the facts behind it are yours to confirm in document 05.

Five languages

English, German, French, Italian and Kiswahili on clean addresses (/de/flying-safaris), with a suggestion bar for visitors whose browser prefers one of them. Your guests and agents come from all four; a native reader checks each before launch.

Search-ready, nothing lost, two looks

Every page has its own title, description and share image in each language; 121 old addresses, from the 2012 site to today's day pages, redirect to their new pages. On the same checklist the new site scores 90 out of 100 as if launched: on-page 76 → 100, indexability 80 → 100, mobile and speed 72 → 92 (Lighthouse performance 86, main image at 3.9 s). From Kenya it answers in about a second today, served from Vercel's Cape Town servers with the images already on Cloudflare; at launch, Cloudflare Pro (about US$25 a month) can serve it from servers in Kenya. The site ships in the look you see first; a second look switches with one setting (add ?skin=daylight to any address).

Why so far below our rate

Because we want Scenic to be one of our aviation case studies in East Africa, and a live site that people use is worth more to us than the difference. In return we ask for four things: that we may name Scenic Air Safaris and show the site in our portfolio; a small “Site by WRK Etc.” line in the footer; a short quote from you after launch; and the three-month numbers (speed, enquiries received) for the case study. Nothing is published about Scenic without your sign-off.

Terms

Fixed price. Payable one third on acceptance, one third at content sign-off, one third at launch; invoiced from Switzerland in CHF, or USD at the day's rate. No Swiss VAT on services exported outside Switzerland. Our fees are net of Kenyan taxes: if withholding tax applies to this contract, it is added on top so the fee arrives in full [your accountant to confirm whether it applies].

The source, the content and the domain configuration are yours from launch, and remain yours if the retainer ends. If it helps, the four other languages can follow English within three months of launch at the same price.

Not included

• A live booking or reservations-system integration (typically CHF 2,500–4,000, quoted when you want it)
• The ideas in the next chapter
• New photography or film
• The legal texts themselves: we put the privacy notice and terms in place; your lawyer writes or approves them
• Print collateral

Itineraries for agents, in their own branding

Your eight brochures, generated from the site instead of designed by hand: always the current price, the right guest numbers and the route map. An agency you approve uploads its logo and colours once and downloads your itineraries and factsheets in its own branding, in any of the five languages, with your facts inside. A new season in January reaches every agent's documents the same day.

A charter price guide

The calculator your site has promised, built when you have rates to put behind it: pick the aircraft, the strips and the days, see an indicative price with its basis, and send it as a request. A price guide that quotes wrong is worse than a form that asks, so it waits for your numbers.

Stack

React and TypeScript on Vercel's global network; Sanity as the content system from launch; our own compiled design system; images served from Cloudflare; Playwright and Lighthouse for verification. No page builder, no third-party trackers by default.

The maps

Airfields from OurAirports and borders, coasts and lakes from Natural Earth, both public-domain datasets, drawn as one lightweight map from the Omo to Victoria Falls. Flight times are yours where you publish them; elsewhere they are our estimates at your published Caravan cruise of 140 kt, rounded, and labelled as such until reservations confirm the block times.

The Caravan drawings

The drawings, seat map and map silhouette are made from a 3D model of the Grand Caravan, re-rendered in your livery. Its licence is ours to settle before launch, at our cost.

The typefaces

The display serif and the text face are commercial fonts; we license them for your domain before launch, within the price. If you prefer, a free serif gives nearly the same look.

Ownership

The repository, the Vercel project and the Sanity project transfer to a Scenic account at launch; we keep collaborator access while the retainer runs. A competent Next.js developer can take the site over from the repository and its documentation.

One suggestion before anything else

Your aircraft page says “Our 12-year safety record is impeccable”. Twelve years was right when it was written; since June 2025 it invites a question the page doesn't answer. We'd suggest taking that one line down on the current site now, rather than waiting for the new one; it is a two-minute edit and we're glad to do it for you.

The new site makes no record claim anywhere. How we fly describes how you fly: the pilots, their hours and training, loads and weather, tracking, operations and maintenance. If it would help, we can draft a short, factual answer for when a guest or agent asks about 5Y-SXI, for you to approve and keep ready, not to publish.

Decisions for you

• Which look to launch with
• Whether all five languages launch together, or English first and the others within three months
• What the site may say about the group and the company's history
• Which prices go on the web, and on what basis
• Whether registrations are published on the fleet page
• Whether “carbon-neutral” and the “first” claims stay as written
• The retainer tier, and whether to build either phase 2 idea

What we need from you

Every fact we kept as published but would like confirmed, every decision, and every file we need (prices, approvals, portraits, camp photo permissions, logo originals, legal texts) is in one questionnaire, grouped by who is best placed to answer: document 05 in this set, which prints with room to write.

Or answer it online: answers save as you type, several people can work on it at once, and files can be uploaded there. Most questions are a tick.