Leading ski chalet holiday company
Alpine Answers use their website as the prime way to showcase all the best ski resorts, chalets and hotels. With the latest information on the site it means their team can always deliver the best possible service to new and current customers.
The Brief
They tasked us to improve their website with better search facilities, higher search rankings, faster page loading, chalet location maps and other technical improvements.
Technology
The website runs in Ruby on Rails, and this project was our first foray into this still relatively new technology.
After a short familiarisation with the nitty-gritty of the website's functions, work started on tidying and optimising the various page's code. Constant checking was done to ensure we made the website compatible with web standards and browsers across both Macs and PCs.
Chalet Location Maps
To help visitors searching through the website for a suitable chalet or hotel, it was decided to create maps of the most popular ski resorts. These would give a visual guide to a chalet or hotel's location in relation to ski lifts, bus stops and main roads.
After illustrating custom maps of ten top resorts, Flash was used to display the resort's features and location of the accommodation.
To make sure the resorts had their chalets and hotels in the right location, co-ordinates were entered into the management system. When a user is looking at a particular chalet, in say Courchevel 1850, a chalet location map is displayed on the page, and by pulling the data from the management system into the Flash file, it shows the correct location for that particular chalet.
“Substance design succeeded where our previous web designers had failed. They immediately understood and ran with our philosophies on attention to detail yet never lost sight of the big picture.”
Winter Brochure
After completing the website, we were asked to design their new brochure for the 2006/07 winter season. The 28 page brochure contains a mixture of staff profiles, resort articles, operator profiles and hotel featurettes. The overall design is of strong typography and photography, clearly showing-off what's on offer, and gives readers a clear idea of what they can expect from Alpine Answers and the various ski travel operators they use.
Client Testimonial
“Substance design succeeded where our previous web designers had failed. They immediately understood and ran with our philosophies on attention to detail yet never lost sight of the big picture. They worked effectively and efficiently to create a website (and brochure) that exceeded all our expectations.”
Simon Hoskyns - Partner, Alpine Answers