KENTUCKY BOURBON TRAIL
A Tall Order Filled
Kentucky is known worldwide for horses, basketball, and bourbon. The latter of which represents a $9 Billion industry that accounts for more than 23,000 jobs in and around the state. To say that working with representatives to re-design the Kentucky Bourbon Trail website was a tall order would be an understatement. Still, the official website circa 2017 was in desperate need of a refresh.
A big job calls for big-time collaboration, so we were happy to partner on this project with Onefold and Balance Creative. While we were responsible for developing the final website, they worked tirelessly to arrange communications, research options, build mood boards, coordinate assets, create and map content, and work with the clients to drive creative direction.
THE CHALLENGE
Redesign the website for an iconic Kentucky experience with compelling visuals and an improved user experience.
A Lack Of Focus
The existing Kentucky Bourbon Trail website did a lot of things at once. In fact, it probably tried to serve too many audiences in too many ways to its detriment. Distilleries know that image is everything, so the trail participants had already built elevated their online experiences for their customers. It was time for the trail itself to join in.
First Things First
The Kentucky Bourbon Trail and its attached team serve many purposes, but the trail primarily exists for tourism. This redesign was an opportunity to reduce clutter and focus on serving potential visitors more effectively. This meant that imagery, navigation, and messaging would be built for them first.
THE SOLUTION
Combine striking imagery and effective messaging with efficient navigation to encourage potential visitors to tour the Trail.
The final design utilized a combination of rich imagery, balanced white space, consistent fonts, efficient navigation, effective interactive elements, and a stable grid built on WordPress to deliver a website optimized to drive more visitors to explore the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.
As previously mentioned, the existing website featured content organization and navigation that sought to serve too many audiences at once. The plan for the redesign was to focus on displaying the most impactful content for potential visitors and to use secondary navigation to serve other audiences.
Regardless of the concept you’re trying to communicate, showing is always easier than telling. Decades of effective marketing have left bourbon lovers with a virtual library of beautiful imagery in their minds. Our job was to try and live up to those expectations and deliver effective illustrations of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail experience. Thankfully, our distillery collaborators were very generous in sharing their libraries and Onefold did a wonderful job gathering assets.
An important content area for the website is the interactive Maps page. This page gives visitors an easy way to locate the various distilleries on the Trail and plan their itineraries. Maps were included for the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and Kentucky Bourbon Trail Craft Distillery Tour, as well as zoomed-in views of Lexington and Louisville and a convenient distance chart.
