Pinehurst Updates

Pinehurst.com

Pinehurst already had a great website (I was the Creative Director for the redesign and led the creative strategy while at Substance), but they needed to make updates in order to handle changing business needs and visitor traffic. The Forest helped evolve several sections of the site to better meet their business goals and visitor objectives.


Redesigned Header Area

Pinehurst.com launched several years ago as a responsive design site, but at that time, the majority of traffic was coming from desktop computers. Since that point in time, the majority of visitors are now on mobile devices. While the overall site design still held up, they were experiencing challenges with how header images were being placed and cropped – an image with the green on the left side of the photo worked well on desktop, but was cropped out when viewed on mobile phones.

We created a new visual style for the headlines, and then provided the flexibility for the marketing team to upload three specific images: one for desktop, one for tablet, and one for mobile. This allowed their team to frame and crop photos for different browser and device sizes, providing more control for how these images would display. These additional photo fields are optional so the staff can choose to upload a single image to be used for all browser sizes, but if they find that isn’t working, it’s easy for them to customize exactly how they want people to see Pinehurst.

Updates to Offers & Packages

In an effort to reduce the “paradox of choice,” Pinehurst simplified their Offers & Packages. In combination with rethinking the number of packages they were offering, the pricing structure for packages also changed from biannual seasons to multiple, flexible seasons for each package.

By reducing the overall number of packages, the layout on the Packages landing page was revised to highlight a simplified description of each package. Then, on Package detail pages, the layout and organization for pricing needed to be updated in order to accommodate multiple prices for single and double occupancy rates across different lodging properties and multiple seasons. To support these changes, the content management system was updated to be extremely flexible, supporting any number of seasonal pricing changes among all properties.

Lead Generation Updates

Pinehurst’s email newsletter is a great marketing channel for promoting upcoming events, packages, and other offerings at the resort. In order to provide additional ways to obtain leads through email marketing, we created a flexible “newsletter signup” component that could be placed on practically any page of the site. This flexibility allows the Pinehurst staff to insert this call to action where it makes the most sense, such as within their long-form “Stories of Pinehurst” section.


These updates launched while I was (and currently am) Creative Director at The Forest For The Trees. I was responsible for interactive strategy, user experience, creative and brand direction, and design. Previously as Creative Director at Substance, I acted as the creative lead for the Pinehurst website redesign.