VISIT LAKE COUNTY

LAKE COUNTY, ILLINOIS, USA

TOURISM INDUSTRY | INTERACTIVE PROJECT | WEBSITE

OBJECTIVE
Visit Lake County promotes the communities of Lake County, Illinois and popular sites throughout the county including Six Flags Great America, Hurricane Harbor, Chicago Botanic Garden, and Ravinia Festival to name just a few. The Lake County, Illinois Convention and Visitors Bureau promotes venues, attractions, festivals and events to leisure travelers as well as group, meeting, reunion, and sports planners. J Rudny was contracted by the convention and visitors bureau to create a fully responsive, and engaging website that utilizes a custom design and content management system (CMS) in order to properly grow and manage content, and promote the area as a popular vacation and event destination.

PROJECT
The Visit Lake County project consisted of resolving the following improvement points.

The original design was outdated and required a custom visual appeal that would attract visitors to learn about seasonal activities and events throughout the county.
Integration of analytics tracking between the site, search engines, and advertising campaigns in order to properly measure activity and conversions.
A user-friendly navigation that encourages visitors to explore the area seasonally as well as by their specific targeted audience.
Integration of a custom content management system (CMS) to allow the management and growth of over 2,500 pages of content and associated images and video.
Installation, adjustments, and monitoring for proper web accessibility throughout the site.
Integration of social media embeds, video embeds, and user generated content (UCG) to aid as supportive content.

Visit Lake County

SOLUTION
Our solution for Visit Lake County was to create a fully responsive design that focused on the visitor experience, web accessibility, user generated content, and proper search and AI indexing features. The new design and development allowed the Visit Lake County team to grow seasonal and evergreen story-based content, and automate cross displays for related events, venues, and additional stories. Visitors are greeted with season-specific stories, events, and top things to do and see, combined with social and video supportive content, web accessibility tools, and streamlined information requests. The final solution includes:

Custom visual design focusing on seasonal content
Full responsive layout for desktop, tablet and mobile devices
Custom CMS to allow full control and growth over existing and new content, as well as AI suggested event content recommendations
Automated content relationship between venues, events, and stories
Integrated web accessibility tools and monitoring
Video and social content integration
Organic search engine optimization (SEO) and AI engine optimization (AEO) process to deliver long-term traffic
Ongoing maintenance and support

IMPACT

Visitor focused design and tools to convert online users to onsite visitors
Full and automated content management tools for the bureau team
Overall Engagement Rate increased to 57%
Organic Search Traffic increased to 50%
Organic Search Traffic Engagement Rate increased to 65%
Overall Traffic increased to over 800K+ unique visitors / year
Overall Page Views increased to over 2M+ views / year

VIEW PROJECT: VisitLakeCounty.org

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