Paradise on the Pacific Rim
The Wickanninish Inn is a world renowned Relais & Chateaux property on the rugged coast of Tofino, British Columbia. Visitors arriving on the far western edge of North America better be ready to explore, and the website we designed prepares them by encouraging users to investigate the rustic elegance of the Inn, and the rugged beauty of the area.
The Wickaninnish Inn was Wallop’s first hospitality website (2006), and the project that catapulted us into our current focus and specialization. While it is the oldest work in our portfolio, it’s one that aged quite nicely and garners a fair amount of adulation.
The Challenge
There were two key selling features for this property – the physical property and amenities, and the location. We also needed a way to feature the many gorgeous photographs that accumulated over the years, while allowing for an aggressive SEO strategy.
From a branding perspective, we needed to position the hotel in a sweet spot between luxury and sophistication on one side, and the rugged outdoors on the other. This required the deployment of some careful design aerobatics by our creative team.
The Result
We built a series of custom interactive pieces to be interspersed throughout the site, starting with the home page aerial that allows users to explore the hotel from a very unique vantage point high in the sky. Artwork and curios from local artists were distributed throughout the site using very subtle interactive pieces.
Hundreds of photos dominated the design, as each page became a photo gallery unto itself; rather than create a conventional, centralized gallery, we opted to make every page of the site a photo or video gallery.
The design and layout drove a perfect balance between high-end sophistication and West Coast ruggedness – something we called “rustic elegance”. The design was honest and highly congruous to the brand, with little gimmickry. The result is an elegant visual interface that has proudly stood the test of time.
A series of custom email and newsletters were designed, coded, and integrated with Campaign Monitor – our go-to email marketing platform. Email submissions to the website are directly loaded into subscriber lists and managed through a private login. Detailed metrics from every email campaign are accessed through the control panel, and this data is used to make ongoing improvements to future campaigns.