Just a week ago, we were wondering when the new Killington web site would be launched, and now we know…today. The site just launched a couple of hours ago.
Like the new logo, the new web site is a tremendous improvement over the old, dated site. The new site design is clean, crisp and much more Web-2.0 like. It’s also a lot easier to navigate and they have fairly successfully integrated all their social media components into the new design. And yes, THE BEAST tagline is also well integrated into the site. (We’ve heard rumors that the new branding and marketing campaign cost in the area of $250,000. For that price, we hope it included everything!)
The home page features a number of “witty” lines for THE BEAST, which include:
- THE BEAST just updated your Facebook status.
- THE BEAST just spoke with your spouse. You can buy an express card.
- THE BEAST invites you to a wicked awesome sleepover.
- THE BEAST has been schooling people for over 40 years.
We’ll see if more get added over time.
Of course, while we like the new site, we also have a few suggestions because we like to see things perfect:
- Search works pretty poorly. A search for “stash” returns “Demos” as the first result. A search for “k1” tells me that the search must be three characters. This is probably not that important as the navigation is pretty well laid-out and we doubt a lot of people are searching.
- While we’re on the subject of search, we’d replace that nearly unreadable search image with something more readable.
- What happened to the ski share listings? (Ok, we admit we’re a little biased about this one.)
- Got a few page not found errors mostly from this page. *Hint: Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a great, free link checker.
- We’re glad that the Insider Blog was moved to be a part of the site. I’d make sure the titles of the posts were clickable, since I tried to click them several times before realizing there was an unreadable “read more” button. Also, don’t forget to redirect http://insider.killington.com here. And finally, I’d still recommend going with WordPress as it has tremendous support and plugins.
- Where are the RSS feeds? They should be included in the meta tags.
- Try to add some 301 redirects instead of 404 pages for pages that Google has indexed.
- Line up the bottom footer so that it is vertically aligned across the page. Get rid of the | in front of Privacy Policy.
Ok, yes, a little anal and we’re not sure our suggestions will be taken, but we figured we’d put our two cents in.
Unfortunately, they did not replace their ecommerce solution which is almost impossible to actually use to place an order. Maybe that can be next on the list?
Be sure to check out the site and let us know what you think.