SilverTech’s incredible design for the Amelia Island website, AmeliaIsland.com, wins the award for Best Event/Travel site for 2014 using the Kentico CMS. The website, now boasting a 450% increase in conversions year-over-year, has become a modern and competitive destination within the travel and tourism industry.

THE VISION

Amelia Island Tourist Development Council (AITDC) sought to grow visitation and position Amelia Island as one of North America’s top 10 island destinations. Working together, SilverTech and AITDC envisioned a website that heightened Amelia Island’s web presence, increased web traffic, and addressed the long-term goal of the AITDC team becoming capable of updating the website’s content quickly and easily.

THE CHALLENGE

SilverTech knew that the main challenge would be organizing AITDC’s existing business database from their previous website. With a comprehensive tourism business listing, the Amelia Island website features a directory of businesses, hotels, restaurants, and other essential destinations for tourists. SilverTech needed to discover the best way to organize and restructure the directory while ensuring that updates to the listings were easy to make.

THE PROJECT

SilverTech chose Kentico for the Amelia Island website redesign primarily for Kentico’s intuitive and user-friendly interface that assured the AITDC team that they could update the website’s content effortlessly. In addition, Amelia Island was looking for a solution that would allow them to personalize the web user experience for visitors based upon the visitor’s location and other information they learn about them. SilverTech utilized and implemented a number of modern features within Kentico’s CMS:

• Responsive and mobile-optimized features
• Page Designer
• Faceted Search
• Extensive Media Galleries for the image-rich website
  

SilverTech built the entire accommodations database with the Kentico Custom Tables feature so Amelia Island content managers could edit accommodation information quickly and easily, including common amenities, location, price, and venue properties. The accommodation search was built using the Kentico Search API and provided the user with a very intuitive and faceted search experience.

THE OUTCOME

Kentico’s comprehensive features allowed SilverTech to create and implement the stunning and responsive Amelia Island website on a short timeline without sacrificing quality. The SilverTech team spent four months prior to website development strategizing and designing the new site’s layout and built the new Amelia Island website in just five weeks.

The new Kentico CMS accomplished exactly what AITDC needed to keep their website up-to-date and relevant, with easy-to-edit pages and a user-friendly interface. SilverTech also integrated AIDTC’s third party applications with the website, creating simpler, more streamlined information flow and processes. The site’s responsive design attracts and retains mobile traffic that was previously overlooked, now with an optimized mobile-friendly experience.

Finally, SilverTech made great use of Amelia Island’s stunning photography in designing and developing a website that was a destination in itself. The website’s homepage boasts striking imagery, enticing copy, and relevant content all within an easy-to-navigate layout. The SilverTech team was proud to collaborate with Amelia Island to craft and concept the executable vision, and the Kentico award further affirms the success of the project.

THE TEAM

This fun and challenging project was organized and implemented by a strong, internal group of SilverTech experts, who are proud to share the accomplishment with one another as well as with the rest of the SilverTech team.

SilverTech’s digital strategist, Michele Johnston-Lash, wrote the direction and vision for the site as well as constructed the accompanying documentation. Karissa Woodward, SilverTech designer, created the beautiful and unique website design. Software engineer Sam Winter developed the impeccable cut up and dynamic search results, while Saurav Amatya remained an integral component of executing on the quick timeline. SilverTech IT director Mike Larrabee oversaw the New Year’s Eve launch, and both Molly McGee and Griffin LaFleur remained consistent, organized, positive forces in building and managing what was to end up as an incredible, successful, and positive partnership with the Amelia Island Tourist Development Council.

The team wishes many thanks to those involved, both directly and indirectly, in this amazing accomplishment.