Winter Park Resort:
Replacing an Outdated CMS with Sitecore 6.5

The Challenge

Intrawest, parent company to five destination ski resorts in North America, found that their current CMS for Winter Park Resort's site was outdated and causing various usability issues. With 80% of travelers researching their travel plans online¹, Intrawest know it was time to update Winter Park Resort's CMS to better server the needs of their site visitors.

As one of the top ski resorts in Colorado², Winter Park Resort's site is key to their business, hosting daily snow and trail reports, up to the minute weather conditions, resort events, promotions and other dynamic content. The Winter Park Resort team knew that their current CMS was limited and could not longer support these demands or grow with the resort and its complex business needs. That's when they turned to Oshyn for help.

With a CMS that was nearing the end of its lifespan, Winter Park Resort was running into reoccurring issues like dead links, time-consuming updates and frequent unscheduled site outages on a routine basis. A complex web of technical workarounds was becoming the norm rather than the exception. They knew they needed a CMS that could handle constant updates, would be easy-to-use and intuitive, and would have built-in reporting tools to help them keep their website running smoothly. Intrawest chose Sitecore CMS because it has the ability to fit their current needs and the flexibility to meet their future needs.


The Solution

Oshyn worked with Winter Park Resort to implement Sitecore 6.5 templates, layouts and sublayouts, and Sitecore Web Forms for Marketers into their site. Sitecore helps businesses like Winter Park Resort better leverage their content, improve customer experience and drive business growth due to its industry-leading flexibility and scalability. Sitecore's Web Forms for Marketers is a module that lets non-technical editors create simple forms to gather customer information quickly and easily. This module also provides reports and analytics to help business users monitor and maximize the effectiveness of their forms as well as effortlessly make changes if needed.

Sitecore 6.5 allows Winter Park Resort to create a full-featured website that is easy for their team to maintain using inline editing, media asset management and rich text editing. Oshyn's Sitecore implementation included integration with Winter Park Resort's customer relationship management (CRM) system, travel booking engine, jobs board, Resorts Interactive media provider, AreaNet weather data feed, and more. With an easy-to-use interface, Sitecore allows the Winter Park Resort team update their website with as little effort and time as possible.

The Results



Oshyn delivered a completely new Sitecore implementation and a new, intuitive editor and user experience within budget and on time. With Sitecore, the Winter Park Resort team will now enjoy the ease of content editing, dynamic promotion modules, simplified administration of the snow report, lift and trail status, in-page editing, an integrated marketing solution and more.

Winter Park Resort can now easily and reliably edit and deploy content updates, making their site fresh and relevant to their users. The Sitecore implementation also included a robust promotion system that allows Winter Park Resort to easily manage their promotions across the site and reuse promotion material in multiple areas, saving the time needed to edit content.

The success of Winter Park Resort CMS implementation led the Intrawest team to continue to partner with Oshyn to assess user experience and perform complete website redesigns of their other five resort sites.

About Intrawest

Intrawest is a leader in the development and management of experiential destination resorts. The Company has a network of resorts at North America's most popular mountain destinations including Mont Tremblant Ski Resort, Steamboat Ski & Resort, Winter Park Resort, Snowshoe Mountain and Stratton Mountain. The Intrawest network also includes Canadian Mountain Holidays, the largest heli-skiing operations in the world and Club Intrawest, a private resort club with exclusive locations around the world. In addition, Intrawest markets and sells real estate at its resorts in North America.

The Technology

• Sitecore 6.5
• Sitecore Web Forms for Marketers
• Lucene Search Engine
• Adobe SiteCatalyst
• jQuery
• IIS 7
• MSSQL 2008
• Windows 2008
• Visual Studio 2010
• NAnt & MSBuild
• Jenkins Continuous Integration Server

Resources

¹ PhocusWright, "Destination Unknown: How US and European travelers decide where to go", 10/2010

² www.winterparkresort.com