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http://www.windrifterresort.com/

Give us some background on some of the members of your team and the company that you work for.

Envision Technology Advisors, located in Providence, Rhode Island, are a team of business consultants specializing in technology. The company’s solutions include server and desktop virtualization, network and security consulting, as well as a full suite of web services, including design, development and online traffic generation.
Envision’s Web team is led by the Director of Web Development, Jeremy Girard. Jeremy provided the overall design of this site, as well as the build of the HTML/CSS templates and the integration into ExpressionEngine. Other Envision team members that contributed to this project include Jeremy Spurr - Traffic Generation Specialist, and Sarah O’Donnell - Senior Designer.

Tell us about the site. What vision were you trying to fill for the client?

As one of the first timeshare resorts in America, the Windrifter Resort was looking for a website that would showcase not only the resort’s accommodations and amenities, but the entire Wolfeboro, NH area as a vacation destination and a great place to become a timeshare owner. The site needed to be warm and welcoming, but also very informative.
To accomplish the project’s goals, we needed a visual design that reflected the lifestyle of the resort and the New Hampshire Lakes Region, as well as system that would allow resort staff to easily keep content on the site current and relevant.
Starting with the visual design of the website, we drew upon imagery of the resort and the surrounding area to create a New England-inspired feel with colors that complemented those of the resort itself. The photos used on the site, which showed the colors of the Wolfeboro area in all 4-seasons of the year, added to the overall palette and brought a variety of new colors and textures into the design.
For the site’s content, we worked with the resort staff to create listings of area dining options and attractions, as well as information on the Wolfeboro area and Lakes Region. Coupled with the information on the resort itself, the site can serve as a resource for anyone looking for vacation information in the New Hampshire Lakes Region.

Was there a specific reason why EE was chosen for this project? Why?

Originally, the site was scoped out as a .NET site with a secure member’s area for resort owners to login and access private information (another requirement for this project). For content management needs, the client would use Adobe Contribute to make minor updates to pages of the site.

After building out the HTML/CSS templates for the pages, we took a look at the solution that had been proposed (custom created .NET application) in light of changes in our own solutions-set at Envision.  Having made a move to EE as our platform of choice, it was ultimately decided that ExpressionEngine would be a much better solution with which to deploy this project. The flexibility of ExpressionEngine, coupled with many of the built-in features of the system, proved a perfect fit for the client’s management needs. By setting up member accounts for a variety of different publishers on the client’s end, we were able to give them control over the site’s content, allowing certain members access to only publish news updates and releases, while others were allowed greater access to manage area information and dining and attraction listings, which can often change seasonally.
For the secure members’ area, ExpressionEngine’s native functionality proved to be more than a match for the resort’s needs – and the staff of the Windrifter are now able to manage their entire site, including content, owner-only information and members’ accounts, all from one easy-to-use interface.

What add-ons were used? and why?

No add-ons were used with this project. EE’s native functionality was robust enough that all of the client’s needs were met with ExpressionEngine alone.

What difficulties did you encounter? How did you address them? Was there a particular add-on that got you out of a bind?

The client’s previous website had gone with any updates for so long, that no one at the resort was really comfortable as a content publisher any longer. Deploying the new site and the ExpressionEngine CMS, we knew that we had to make updating drop-dead easy to ensure buy-in from the resort staff immediately. If the learning curve was too great, the same apprehension for updating content from the previous site would affect the new one and content would quickly become stale and outdated.
To shorten the learning curve, we configured publisher accounts to have direct links to the areas of content they would have to manage and made sure the content they needed to complete to add news updates or area attractions and dining were as straightforward as answering a few questions. Once those questions were answered (such as “what is the street address of the restaurant?”), the site would take care of the rest and deploy the information on the site as needed.
By giving users easy access to the content they had to maintain and giving them a workflow that felt natural to them, we helped energize resort staff who are now excited to keep the site updated and the information relevant to their audience.

Anything else that you would like to say? Any advice to those that may be curious in EE?

The flexibility that I mentioned a few times already is really one of the most attractive aspects of EE for us at Envision. The system does not limit us from a visual standpoint – whatever we design, we can deploy using EE – and the functionality of the system and the many add-ons available for it make it very powerful. We have now deployed half a dozen EE-powered websites and we have about twice that amount currently in production and we have yet to come across a requirement that EE, or one of those add-ons, did not handle beautifully.

Company: Envision Technology Advisors

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