Colonial Williamsburg Website Redesign by Sean Rooks at Coroflot.com

Colonial Williamsburg Website Redesign

Colonial Williamsburg Website Redesign from Sean Rooks

Colonial Williamsburg Website Redesign

As Manager, Interaction & Engagement and and now Director, Digital Guest Experience I spearheaded the Foundation's first major retail digital initiative ever: the redesign of our travel customer-facing website.

I was responsible for developing the customer and business case for the project, the overall project strategy, securing buy-in from executive management, estimating ROI, managing project teams including the user experience design process and the creative direction, identifying and suggesting improvements to internal processes, managing the change to those processes, creating KPIs and dashboards, and owning the budget and schedule.

The project is multi-phase with the final components, including a new purchase process for key business areas (hotels, tickets, dining, golf, and spa) and travel planning tools, due to deploy by Q2 2013. Also responsible for managing team responsible for content strategy, development, maintenance, and governance.

View Website

The site was designed with a new aesthetic that would complement the historic content as well as the high-end resort-themed amenities of Colonial Williamsburg

Helping answer "What is Colonial Williamsburg" was one of the key objectives. Discover Colonial Williamsburg does that.

Events are the backbone of the Colonial Williamsburg experience, and we needed to build a new events calendar for the site. In addition to the front-end, a new back-end database was constructed and a new process put in place for business teams to populate it.

Presenting and marketing Colonial Williamsburg's official hotels in a more compelling way was job one. My in-house team was responsible for all content and we built the entire site in 12 weeks.

We enhanced our packages and offers section to better help guests find the best price for their visit.

The second phase of the project rolls out a new hotel reservation and ticket purchase process, and a single checkout. This replaces the current cumbersome process our guests need to complete to book a trip.

A new idea for hospitality sites: A single shopping cart that can support ticket purchases and hotel, dining, spa, and golf reservations in one purchase. The infrastructure required is substantial to connect over half a dozen systems.