USA
176 N RacineCANADA (ON)
88 Queens Quay WestCANADA (BC)
701 West Georgia Suite 1500NEW ZEALAND
79 Lichfield StreetPanorama is a spectacular mountain resort in British Columbia, Canada. Their intimate village experience combines ski with a vibrant scene, hot pools, indulgent dining, shopping and spa treatments. We managed to persuade long time ski enthusiast and digital strategist Lawrence to take off his skis for long enough to tell us about the websites we’ve created with the Panorama team.
The Panorama team first emailed us in 2014. They’d seen sites we’d built for Mount Ruapehu and a few other ski areas, and they invited us to help them redesign their website. It was an intensely collaborative project, and their new site went live in late 2014.
Their new site was quite different to the typical ski resort site. Our mantra at the time was inspiration, information, transaction, a philosophy now borne out by research from key digital travel players like Google and Facebook. So, Panorama’s site was heavy on inspire, and a lot more visual than their competitors, who tended to focus on product.
Our take was that we weren’t selling ski passes. We were promoting the Panorama experience, and if we did that well, the ski-passes would sell themselves. Panorama is a boutique destination resort. People typically stay for a week. So, the story we told through their site was all about the whole adventure. And that was quite revolutionary back in 2014!
The site worked hard for the next three seasons. We had a good relationship with the Panorama team, but we were pretty hands off. It was your classic waterfall website build basically, where we hit it hard and then left it alone, and the site didn’t evolve much during those three years.
So, three seasons later it was time for a new site. Despite the site having performed well, we’d encountered challenges with third-party hosting, and we were retiring their content management system, a proprietary CMS based on the now obsolete Adobe ColdFusion 9. These issues had understandably raised questions, so the Panorama team decided to take their new site project to a competitive pitch.
We’re not going to pretend that a competitive pitch isn’t always a heavy sigh moment for us. Unless a project is publicly funded, our partner taking a project to tender tells us that we haven’t done the best job we can at meeting their needs. But, a proposal is also an opportunity for us to add value and challenge ourselves and our partners. And that’s just what we did.
Websites are technical things, and technology is important, but it should never be the focus of your project. The number one goal of any website project is to improve the user experience you offer your website visitors. Technology is simply one of the tools you use to do that. To paraphrase the great Simon Sinek, it’s your how, not your why.
We addressed the Panorama team’s core technical concerns, with our full-service hosting solution and a well-supported open-source CMS. Then we inspired them to think beyond the technology. We reviewed their visitor journey, focused on their destination over product, and pushed the boundaries of possibility beyond their brief.
It was a very consultative appointment. We spoke with key people throughout the Panorama organisation to establish trust. We believe we won the project because we thought wider and bigger than the other agencies and articulated an effective solution with clear KPIs.
We asked Marke Dickson, Director of Marketing, Sales and Guest Services, what advice he would give a business about to embark on a website build, on choosing their agency partner.
Marke Dickson, Director, Marketing, Sales and Guest Services, Panorama Mountain Resort
Although we’d worked with the Panorama team for years, we didn’t want to make assumptions, and we didn’t want to offer them more of the same, so we started from scratch and ran a full discovery with them. We looked at their visitors, their markets and what was important to Panorama.
We reviewed their competitors to see if much had changed in three years. It hadn’t. Most ski areas market online in the same way. They lead with product and they’re sales-centric. There’s no focus on inspiration or experience. We asked the Panorama team, “How bold do you want to be?”. At the heart of the new site is Panorama’s own vison. Panorama welcomes guests, not visitors. The Panorama team’s job is to make sure those guests have great experiences.
When we began work on the Panorama project, we’d just spent a week analyzing international airport sites. We were impressed by the way Dubai Airports’ top nav reflected the traveler journey, and we thought, what might Panorama’s site look like if their navigation reflected their guest journey?
This insight was our greatest innovation. We re-structured the entire site around the guest experience, and refocused content on guests’ needs. We worked with Story & Co, who did an amazing job on the website content (we create quality content every day and we know a great job when we see it!). This guest focused navigation helped the Story & Co really understand the purpose of each piece of content, and what it needed to deliver to Panorama’s guests.
24.48%
1,193%
1,013%
At TimeZoneOne we strive to work in a highly collaborative way, because we know many minds make for better results. The Panorama project was a hugely enjoyable collaboration because we had the full and enthusiastic participation of the team at Panorama, who committed 110% to the project, and we also had the talented people at Story & Co also gave their insightful feedback.
We’re very proud of panoramaresort.com. It’s one of the finest sites we’ve ever made. But we’re even more proud of the trust we built with our partners. Digital designer Dice Sales has the last word. “We listened to them and they listened to us. That’s why it went so smoothly. It’s been awesome.”
“I congratulate you on such a successful web design and development project. Working with you and your team has been a blast. Thanks for pushing hard and teaching us. It is a fantastic website and we’re committed to making it better ... I look forward to continuous collaboration to keep this website at the forefront of the industry!”
Related Case Studies
Kiwicare came to us with a quest to be recognised as the authoritative voice in pest control, lawn and garden-care in New Zealand. Let’s be honest - in a country filled with DIY attitude and a great love for the outdoors, this was, and is, an incredibly lofty goal.
If you have to contact your developer every time you want to make updates to your website, that's a real issue.
We knew Broken Shed couldn't go toe-to-toe with the big brands on a traditional marketing campaign. Good thing our creative teams are resourceful and innovative
NZ
US
