Mountain People

About this project

Sebastian came to me looking for help with the self-built Squarespace website he created as an emergency replacement for a hacked Wordpress site - the latter being an unfortunately common effect of working with an open source platform like Wordpress.

He had made a good start, but had built the pages in an inflexible way that meant it was impossible to use any search or filter functions to allow visitors to easily find what they needed, and the website lacked the visual finesse that the property owners were looking for from Mountain People, who were in some cases the sole booking agents for their luxury alpine chalet properties. Sebastian decided that ad-hoc tweaks weren’t going to cut it, so he opted for a total rebuild and redesign.

As part of the process, we worked together to identify which information about the chalets should be shown upfront, and which bits could be tucked away into an accordion to keep pages feeling more streamlined. We moved the local area guides away from printed versions that were difficult to maintain, and instead created searchable online versions in English and French that guests could access on the move, that also added SEO value to the website. We implemented further SEO improvements to the chalet property pages, as well.

We also developed the concept of curated collections, allowing Sebastian to showcase clusters of properties that met certain criteria, and easily change them up seasonally or whenever he needed to push certain properties to the top.

Lastly but most importantly, I helped Sebastian evaluate booking engine solutions that would be cost effective and scalable to grow as he brought more properties on board, and styled the system and integrated it into the website for a seamless user experience.

NOTE: After project completion, all clients receive training to empower them to update their own websites, so bear in mind that anything you see on the live website may not reflect my design work.