Choose Chicago — Building a Website Worth the City
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 actually planned a trip. The content was sprawling, redundant, and difficult to navigate. Over 3,000 pages. No clear consumer journey. And a mobile experience that wasn't keeping up with how people actually 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: eliminating over 3,000 redundant pages without losing the content that actually mattered. From there, we rebuilt the site around the consumer journey — creating a more immersive experience for visitors at every stage of trip planning, improving the mobile experience significantly, 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 also won the 2020 Illinois Excellence in Tourism Award for Best Website (Budget A) at the Illinois Governor's Conference on Travel & Tourism.
Why This Matters For My Clients Today:
A website rebuild of this scale is fundamentally a content strategy and audience clarity project. The technology is the easy part. The hard part is understanding who your audiences are, what they need at each stage of their journey, and how to organize everything around that — not around your org chart. That's exactly what I help clients think through today, whether they're rebuilding a site or just trying to make sense of their existing marketing.
2020 Illinois Excellence in Tourism Award - Best Website - Choose Chicago
