Alpenglow Expeditions

As a small, high-end guiding company, Alpenglow Expeditions provides a world-class level of service.  Their teams are small, their guides extremely well-trained and experienced.  Clients who have been on an Alpenglow expedition return for another at one of the highest rates in the industry.

When we first met with Alpenglow, however, you wouldn't have known this from their website.  Because it had been built almost exclusively in Flash without a CMS back-end, they weren't able to edit any content except for the blog, so most of it was outdated (not to mention nearly impossible for search engines to index).  Perhaps even more surprising, we discovered that Alpenglow had an unbelievable collection of photographs from past expeditions that had gone almost entirely unused when the old site had been built!

With this in mind, we designed the new Alpenglow Expeditions website with these photos at its core.  The goal was to make it impossible to visit any page on the site without yearning to be camped high above the clouds in the Himalayas or Patagonia.  We think we succeeded-- take a look for yourself! 

•  A "Next Expedition" area at the bottom of every page arouses visitors' curiosity-- and automatically updates itself based on the dates of the expeditions.

• A "View Expedition" button on the large slideshows allows users to go straight to an expedition if they see a photo and want to see the view for themselves.

• The Sign up for a newsletter area works without a page refresh, so visitors can sign up without getting taken away from the page they're on.

Of course, the site is built on Drupal, which means Alpenglow can easily add new photos themselves as they take them.  They can also change expedition descriptions or dates, edit the sponsors page, add videos to the homepage you get the idea.