I am smitten by Squaw’s new website. Yes, it’s beautifully designed. Yes, it’s wonderfully responsive. Yes, it’s easy to get around. But what I want to highlight this week is the marketing BEHIND all that. Because that, my friends, is the best I’ve ever seen. Huge kudos to Squaw and Origin.

On Monday I talked about the value of a simple, 4-link element on Squaw/Alpine’s landing page.

But clicking on a link is supposed to take you somewhere, right? Yes, yes it does, and where it takes you is the incarnation of something I’ve been hoping to see for years.

Status Quo
For years, resorts websites have been encyclopedias. Collections of short snippets of information about anything and everything related to the resort.

In that time, for the most part, we have been designing not new encyclopedias, but new tables of contents and indexes to facilitate the ability of the visitor to find what they are looking for.

On that note, I’ve been playing with an idea that has been hiding in plain sight on thousands of other sales pages.

Use Pieces to Tell a Story
The idea I started sketching out a few months ago was simply this: turn all those encyclopedia entries into pieces of modular content that can be stacked and combined to create dynamic sales pages that tell specific stories to different visitor types.

So instead of these:

You have these:

And instead of this:

You have this:

That’s as far as I got, but luckily Squaw’s new website shows the right way to act on these trends.

Back to Squaw
Now, let’s take a look at, again, how Squaw took a sales-page/storytelling style that has been working wonders in other industries and used it to tell simple, relevant stories to the clickers on those links.

Remember, all of those blocks of content existed in Squaw’s old site. But they existed independently, like a page torn out of a book.

Squaw combined them into one, flowing story that gives a carefully planned sequence of information (a story) to specific visitor type in a beautifully designed and executed format.

Again, amazingly well done, Squaw and Origin. Bravo.

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.