Lynnwood Washington Tourism Website Redesigned

Lynnwood Washington is a shopper’s paradise located just 15 minutes away from Seattle.  From a tourism perspective, Lynwood offers a unique value proposition: Close to the City… Close to the Country… Close to the Mountains… Close to the Sea.

Blizzard Internet recently  redesigned a website for the City of Lynnwood’s Tourism Division and wanted to show it off a bit.  It is a nice looking website built on a WordPress content management system.   Lynnwood’s Project Tourism Manager, Mary Monroe shared here experience of working with Blizzard to redesign their website:

“Blizzard staff have all made us feel like an important customer, even though we are a relatively small account.  Working with the design team has been a breeze, they know what they are doing and have been very accommodating in letting us experiment with different ideas.”

The city had several pressing needs that drove their redesign:

Their current website was faring poorly in search engines and needed to be rebuilt in a more search engine friendly format.   Lynnwood also wanted help getting their webpages optimized.

“Because of the optimization provided by Blizzard, people are finding our site for the first time, even though it had been active for  several years.  The feed back we are getting is great-the overall look and feel are very well received.  Site visitor have commented on how easy it is to find what they are looking for. ” Mary Monroe, Lynnwood Project Tourism Manager

Their staff needed to be able to manage their content. Lynnwood needed an Event Calendar that was easy to update in order to promote festivals and events locally.

“Content management is critical to us.  As a tourism site, we need to be able to update events, prices, transportation schedules etc. daily.  The Blizzard system is very easy to use, provides us with an outstanding set of tools and makes it possible for us to manage our site easily.  Best of all, if we do have any problems or questions, they are always there to help out.” Mary Monroe, Lynnwood Project Tourism Manager

They liked their design, but the navigation was clunky for the visitor and it was hard to move around.  Reorganizing the content into functional categories for different segments was mandatory.  Some content was removed and some content was also enhanced, in an effort to make the site more useful.

“We love the new design-colorful, inviting, easy to navigate.  By changing the overall format of the site and the content we have been able to provide a better experience for site visitors.  The increase in site traffic has been noticeable, and the site is only a couple of months old.  Visitors are now going to pages they they rarely did in the previous format.” Mary Monroe, Lynnwood Project Tourism Manager

And of course, the website had to be brought in on budget!

“One of the things we appreciated was Blizzard’s keeping us up to date on where we were on the budget. The design portion of the project came in on budget perfectly.   Their marketing staff (Kathy Barta) took the funds we had set aside for web marketing and developed a program that has been very successful.  Their knowledge of the industry is invaluable to us!“ Mary Monroe, Lynnwood Project Tourism Manager

Thanks to the City of Lynnwood and Mary Monroe for working with Blizzard!