The other day I found myself on Mohawk Mountain’s website. As a resort marketing blogger is want to do, I was wandering around and just observing some of their tactics.

Do they have SSL setup? Check.
How about an email sign up for? Two, in fact.
Hours and directions? Easy to find.

The usability and content of the site was actually really impressive once I dug in.

But the thing that got my wheels turning the most wasn’t visible to the typical visitor, it’s something weird folks like myself would notice: their CMS.

What to Do About WordPress
Mohawk Mountain is built on WordPress. As I began writing this post I decided to run the “Is_Wordress” script on my database of resorts to see how many are currently running on this CMS.

As we speak, thousands upon thousands of pageviews are being served up on roughly 190 different ski area websites via WordPress. If you’re familiar with this CMS, you can assume there are a few key reasons they’ve done so:

1. Cost: WordPress is free and the volume of developers focused on that platform bring costs down significantly when shopping for a designer, developer or theme.
2. Experience: If you’ve worked in the digital space for a while, you’ve almost certainly spent a good amount of time in WP Admin area. So when a new website is on the table, why not use something you already know.
3. Community: and because so many people live/work in WordPress, finding fixes to bugs or a plugin to solve that problem is fast and affordable.

With those perks, it’s also easy to see why so many of those resorts are on the smaller side.

The Problem (and Call)
Wordpress is not right for every resort. But with more than 1/3 of mountains using it, the issue here is how few resort-specific resources exist.

I think there’s an opportunity here for an agency or budding entrepreneur to become THE go-to source for resort WordPress information and work. To be the agency that doesn’t fight this trend, but embraces it. The agency that shows resorts how to use WordPress correctly and securely.

Mohawk Mountain and 190 other resorts could use some support based on their resort-specific needs. The question is, who will provide it for them?

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.