Redesign your website before tourist season

On the Outer Banks the website calendar runs backwards from Memorial Day. The customers who will fill your summer are planning in winter and early spring — comparing rentals, choosing a charter, deciding where to eat on the first night — and they are doing it on your site months before they are standing in your doorway. A redesign that launches in June has missed most of the people it was built for.

Work the timeline backwards. The new site should be live and settled by early spring, which means content and photography are finished in late winter, which means the planning conversation happens in the autumn after the season closes. That is also when owners actually have time to answer questions about their own business. Nobody writes good service descriptions in August.

Fix the path that makes money first. For most coastal businesses that is one action — a booking, a reservation, a call, a quote request — and the question is whether a visitor on a phone, on patchy signal, can complete it in a minute. Everything else on the site is secondary to that path working on the smallest screen, with enlarged text, and with a keyboard.

Build for the whole coast, not just your town. Cape Hatteras National Seashore alone covers the coast from Nags Head to Ocracoke (Cape Hatteras NS — over 70 miles), and visitors search by where they are staying. If you serve Corolla, Duck and Kill Devil Hills, the site should say so on pages a search engine can find, not in a single line in the footer.

Use the quiet months for the accessibility work, because it is detailed rather than difficult. The Justice Department's position is that the ADA applies to websites of public-facing businesses, and its guidance names the usual barriers: low contrast, images without alt text, video without captions, unlabelled forms and mouse-only menus. Writing alt text for a photo gallery or captioning a promotional video is exactly the sort of task that fits a January afternoon and never fits a July one.

If you supply web content to a town or county agency, add a dated item to the plan. The 2024 Title II rule applies WCAG 2.1 Level AA to that content, with deadlines set by population (compliance April 26, 2027 / April 26, 2028), and the off-season is when that work can be done without disrupting anything.

Finally, freeze the site before the crowds arrive. Launch, test, fix, and then stop making structural changes by late spring. The busiest weeks of the year are the wrong time to discover a broken form.

Plan in autumn, build in winter, launch by early spring, freeze before summer. Call us after Labor Day and there is time to do it properly.