Visit Drummond Island
Tourism & destination marketing
One of the most remote corners of the Upper Peninsula, with lodging, dining, trails and events scattered across a dozen places. Now in one place.
The problem
The Drummond Island Tourism Association, and anyone trying to plan a trip there.
Drummond Island sits at the far eastern end of the Upper Peninsula, reachable by ferry. That remoteness is the entire appeal and also the entire problem: a visitor has to make more decisions before arriving than they would for anywhere on the mainland, and the answers were spread across separate operators, printed material and word of mouth.
A destination organization has a harder information problem than a single business. It represents many independent operators, none of which it controls, and it has to help a visitor navigate all of them without appearing to favour any.
What I built
A fast, image-led site that treats trip planning as the primary task rather than as a page in the navigation. Lodging, dining, trails, and events sit together, structured so a visitor can move between them the way they actually plan — by what they want to do, not by which business provides it.
Built for the conditions it is used in: often on a phone, often on a slow connection, often before the visitor has ever set foot on the island.
- Information architecture across many independent operators
- Trip-planning-first navigation
- Image-heavy pages that still load quickly
- Events and seasonal content
- Local search fundamentals for a destination, not a business
Why not a template
A template organizes a site around a business. A destination has no single business at its centre — it has an ecosystem, and the structure has to serve discovery across all of it. That is an information architecture problem, and it is decided before any design begins.
What it demonstrates
- 01Real client delivery, with an organization and a board
- 02Information architecture for an ecosystem rather than a company
- 03Discovery-oriented navigation
- 04Performance under image-heavy content
- 05Place-based and seasonal content structures
Tell me what you're trying to build.
Tell me about your business and what's getting in the way. You'll get a straight, specific reply back, usually within one business day.