Visit website: www.choosechicago.com
Challenge:
Choosechicago.com had a problem that a lot of destination websites have. It was built around what the organization wanted to say, not around how visitors planned a trip. The content was sprawling, redundant, and hard to navigate. More than 3,000 pages. No clear consumer journey. And a mobile experience that wasn't keeping up with how people searched and browsed.
My job was to fix all of that while keeping the site running, managing stakeholders across the organization, and rebuilding the content strategy from scratch.
What I did:
I led a 15-month end-to-end rebuild of choosechicago.com, overseeing strategy, content architecture, UX, partner value, and advertising opportunities, while managing a cross-functional team of designers, developers, and content writers.
The first and most daunting task: cutting the site from more than 3,000 pages to about 1,100, without losing the content that mattered. From there, we rebuilt the site around the consumer journey, creating a more immersive experience at every stage of trip planning, improving the mobile experience, and introducing new advertising opportunities that added partner value.
The Results:
The new choosechicago.com exceeded its 2019 traffic goal by 10%, surpassing 9 million total visits, with meaningful growth in new users and mobile engagement. It won the 2020 Illinois Excellence in Tourism Award for Best Website (Budget A) at the Illinois Governor's Conference on Travel and Tourism.
Why This Matters For My Clients Today:
A website rebuild of this scale is a content strategy and audience question. The technology is the easy part. The hard part is knowing who your audiences are, what they need at each stage of their journey, and how to organize everything around that instead of around your org chart. That's what I help clients think through today, whether they're rebuilding a site or trying to make sense of their existing marketing.
2020 Illinois Excellence in Tourism Award - Best Website - Choose Chicago
