Turning a Historic Attraction’s Website Into a Better Visit-Planning Tool
Historic Attraction | Content Strategy · UX · SEO · Conversion Optimization
Visiting a historic site should feel like an adventure. Figuring out how to visit it shouldn’t.
For this nationally recognized historic attraction, I helped rethink two of the most important parts of the website to make it easier for prospective visitors to understand what they could do, plan their day, and ultimately take the next step toward booking.
The Challenge
The website had plenty of information. The problem was finding and using it.
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Important details were spread across the site, experiences weren’t always presented in a way that made comparison easy, and visitors had to do more work than necessary to answer basic planning questions.
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The homepage presented a similar opportunity. I didn't need to write more content. I just needed to figure out how to best format what was already available.
The Strategy
Instead of asking visitors to learn how the organization categorized its offerings, I focused the experience around the questions people actually have when planning a visit.
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- What can I do?
- How much time should I plan for?
- Which experience is right for me?
- What do I need to know before I arrive?
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Those questions became the foundation for determining what information deserved priority and where it should live.
A historic attraction can offer tours, exhibits, grounds, events, dining, shopping, and other experiences. However, the choices can quickly become overwhelming, especially for first-time visitors.Â
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I created clearer content groupings and pathways to help visitors understand their options without having to dig through multiple pages or decipher the differences themselves.
Homepages are for telling your story, but they're also where your potential visitors start theirs.Â
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I was able to rework the content hierarchy to balance inspiration with practical decision-making, creating stronger pathways into experiences, planning resources, and ticketing.
Throughout the experience, I looked for opportunities to reduce dead ends and make the next action obvious.
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That meant more intentional calls to action, stronger connections between related content, and booking opportunities positioned where visitors were most likely to need them.
What I Delivered
Homepage Strategy
Plan Your Visit Experience
Visitor Journey & UX
Reworked the homepage hierarchy to balance storytelling with clearer paths to experiences, planning information, and ticketing.
Restructured planning content around the questions visitors actually ask, making essential information easier to find and use.
Created more intuitive pathways from initial discovery to experience selection, trip planning, and ultimately booking.
Strengthened calls to action, internal linking, and search-focused content to help more visitors find the site.
Conversion & SEO
Membership New Users
+433%
Membership content reached significantly more first-time users, an indication that the new pathway was introducing the offering to audiences who hadn't previously found it.
Group Visits Sessions
+234%
Giving Group Visits a dedicated pathway dramatically increased traffic to an important offering that had previously been difficult to discover.
Itinerary Sessions
+46%
Moving itineraries higher on the page and adding a clear CTA helped more visitors discover content designed specifically to help them plan their day.
VIP Tour
New Users
+40%
Giving greater visibility to a high-priority premium experience helped it reach more new prospective visitors.
The Results
And this is where things get especially fun: the changes didn't just make the website easier to use. They made a measurable difference.
The Takeaway
Sometimes improving a website really is just making what's already there easier to find. This project showed how much impact thoughtful content strategy can have on the visitor journey.
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By viewing the site through a visitor's eyes, I created clear pathways to experiences that had historically been easy to miss.Â
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It’s the kind of work I love most: finding the disconnect between what an organization wants people to know and what its audience actually needs, then figuring out how content can bring the two together.