The Visit Williamsburg website was launched when social media was in its infancy, online video was scarce and smartphones and tablets were not yet on the scene.
A new website will soon incorporate those features and much more.
The Williamsburg Area Destination Marketing Committee, which operates the Visit Williamsburg website, voted 8-0 Monday to finalize a contract with Florida-based Miles Media to engineer and launch a new website designed to cater to contemporary audiences. The site is expected to be online by Oct. 1.
Visit Williamsburg is meant to serve as a repository of information for potential tourists who are planning trips to the Historic Triangle. The current iteration, launched in 2006 and spruced up in 2009, features information about dining, lodging, vacation deals and things to do in the Triangle, but its presentation relies primarily on text and images.
Miles Media, a firm which specializes in travel marketing and has experience designing websites for groups like WADMC, is now tasked with crafting a site featuring ample video, interactive mapping, social media, a more modern design and a slew of other features to better appeal to its users.
The firm will receive $193,100 for designing and building the site, and an additional $6,600 for ongoing work for the rest of 2015. WADMC issued a request for proposals for the project last year, which received bids ranging from $131,060 to $295,000 to build the site.
“I think [the website] will pay huge dividends,” said Phillip Emerson, a WADMC member and the executive director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. He called it a “major step” for WADMC.
In addition to adding features common in modern websites, Miles Media will also maintain the website in the future and continuously work to make sure content on the page like videos and text are set up to lure users into visiting the page.
“This site was built in ’06,” WADMC Executive Director Corrina Ferguson said of the current Visit Williamsburg. “It needs to be redone. It’s phenomenally well done, but it hasn’t kept up with the world. Consumers have evolved, [and the Historic Triangle’s] competitors have evolved.”
Ferguson said the new website will incorporate software that detects the search habits of its visitors thereby allowing for unique content to be served. Ferguson gave an example of a user who has in the past searched for “romantic couple getaways,” who would then reach Visit Williamsburg, where something like a picture of a couple having a good time in the Triangle would be displayed.
She said the site will turn to video to showcase the area’s amenities. For example, last August WADMC finished filming more than 50 hours of footage of two families visiting and having fun at landmarks throughout the Triangle.
“People consume [ video] so easily, so we’ll look [to add more video as time goes on],” she said. “It’s so much better to tell the story [of what awaits people who travel to the Triangle].”
She said the new Visit Williamsburg will also be fully compatible with smartphones and tablets, so visitors can access the site and enjoy its full experience no matter what kind of platform they are using.
Ferguson said she expects the new site to attract more natural traffic when it launches because it will be more tuned with the type of information search engines look for when compiling lists of results.
In 2016, Miles Media will work with WADMC to create a monthly plan for marketing the website and ensuring it is set up to most efficiently cater to what search engines look for. The contract calls for the company to receive $63,400 over the year for that work in addition to regular maintenance, software licenses and fees for the hardware that will host the website.
Between now and the launch of the new website, the current website will receive a few improvements. It will soon feature video from the two families visiting the area, along with interactive maps and trip itineraries.
WADMC is composed of representatives from the three Triangle localities along with groups and attractions including Colonial Williamsburg, the Virginia Tourism Corporation, the Williamsburg Hotel & Motel Association, the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, Busch Gardens and the Greater Williamsburg Chamber & Tourism Alliance.
The committee oversees a marketing fund for the Triangle, which is used to promote the area to out-of-town visitors. Much of its funding is derived from a $2 per night tax levied on hotel room stays in the Triangle.
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