With marketing budgets tightening and full-scale site redesigns becoming somewhat less frequent, we are seeing a growing number of clients that wish to make changes opting for optimization. Whether the site was originally developed by The Royal Order or not, we are being tasked with modifying the experience based on changing business requirements, user feedback or performance metrics. Such was the case with Destination Kohler.
User feedback collected from online site surveys indicated several flaws in the home page architecture of both Destination Kohler (Wisconsin and St Andrews) sites that made it difficult to access specific content. Featured content tiles were not self-evident and in many cases redundant with global navigation. Secondary and footer navigation needed to be reorganized, and the page needed to be optimized for search engines and tagged with Omniture code. Additionally, the business wished to do a better job telling the brand story and promoting specific content such as packages, book online, e-commerce and special events.
Our biggest challenge was in making strategic architectural and interface modifications without redesigning the entire site — since aside from the landing pages, site content was to remain unchanged. A primary goal was allowing users to book online at any time during their site visit. Since the interface was only 800 pixels wide, it was determined in IA that if we added a column to the right, we could stay within the standard 1024 display dimension, while housing a variety of ’support’ tools — including the persistent booking widget, 800 number and click to chat. In the interest of keeping this column efficient and the content apparent but digestible, we chose to employ javascript and reveal them one at a time interactively. This column is carried throughout the site, and was a relatively simple update for the technical team to deploy.
From a branding standpoint, DK wished to update the look and feel to make it more vibrant and contemporary. Garamond was the dominant typeface, and in addition to being difficult to read in navigational menus, it’s application said ‘conservative’. Avenir was selected as a clean sans serif alternative, with a wide variety of weights and legibility at small sizes. The color palette for both sites have also been tweaked and extended to reflect the two similar but different brand experiences. In redesigning the landing pages, the breadth of service offerings has been given center stage, sequencing through a variety of beautiful location photography within an embedded Flash movie. Simplifying the promotional spiffs and focusing navigational organization makes finding content easy, and browsing content rewarding.
Sometimes relatively small modifications to an existing site can make a big difference.
-TH