Sector(s)
Rapid City is the primary gateway to the tourist attractions of Black Hills of South Dakota and eastern Wyoming and is a fast-growing destination in its own right. Visit Rapid City (VRC) is a destination marketing organization (DMO) that promotes the fun and varied highlights within the city as a compliment to the incredible parks, monuments and outdoor life that surrounds it.
Chapter Three and VRC partnered in late 2019 and early 2020 to redesign the VRC website to make content easier to find and consume. A key aspect was establishing a mobile-first approach and extensive use of taxonomy and faceted resources and search, which users are accustomed to with other travel related websites and tools.
About the project
The Redesign Challenge
Visit Rapid City (VRC) needed to rebuild their website, not just for visitors looking for tourist information but also to assist the VRC team's ability to manage the content in the CMS. The existing infrastructure and landing pages were difficult to maintain and required alot of hand-coding of related content, links and other resources.
The old site was also quite cluttered with nested landing pages, as hundreds of tourist, shopping and dining listings kept getting added without an effective way for users to sort through them. Plus the VRC blog was disconnected from the main site, making user engagement more complicated and content more laborious for admins to publish.
The Chapter Three Solution
Our mobile-first approach ensured that we turned their hundreds of listing pages into a taxonomy-driven resource library of "things to do"; perfect for families looking for quick ideas tailored to their specific needs. We also found an approach that works best for their beautiful images on both mobile and desktop and created a map interface that places Rapid City at the center of a fascinating collection of outdoor parks and recreation areas.
We moved the external blog over to the main site, fostering tighter connections between the dining, lodging and shopping listings on the website and the stories that connected visitors to them.
Why Drupal was chosen
The site was already on Drupal 7 (though the blog was on Wordpress); the move to Drupal 8 would offer some significant opportunities to rethink content, design and technical approach. Key to our plan with D8 were these aspects:
- Ease of integration with external booking engine and event feeds
- Component-based design to allow for sustainable, easy page-building by client team
- Creation of a unified experience between the website and blog platform
- Ability to use content types and taxonomies for faceted search
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
