Travel and Tourism

KootenayDirt.com is a simple, mobile-friendly website designed to showcase the premier mountain biking destinations across the Kootenay Rockies region of British Columbia. Originally built as a single-page site on Drupal 7, the platform has since been upgraded to a modern, responsive Drupal 11 architecture to ensure seamless performance and an optimal user experience across all devices. 

Key Details 

• Client: Claris Media (developed for Tourism Fernie)
• Platform/CMS: Drupal 11 (Migrated from Drupal 7)
• Core Purpose: To highlight and promote regional mountain biking trails, community culture, and local riding events in the Kootenay Rockies.

 Features & Impact

• Mobile-First Design: Optimized for riders on the go, allowing easy access to trail networks and local community information straight from smartphones.
• Regional Promotion: Serves as a digital gateway for tourism, helping mountain bikers plan trips, discover over 680+ trails, explore local bike parks, and immerse themselves in the "real mountain culture" of the region.

Executed a full-scale technical modernization and rebuild of ZenSeekers.com, a premier Western Canada travel platform owned by Seekers Media. Replaced legacy systems with a high-performance, SEO-optimized digital experience to maximize organic traffic and user engagement. 

Key SEO & Technical Achievements

• Site Modernization & Speed: Overhauled core architecture and front-end interface to improve Core Web Vitals and page-load speeds, boosting search rankings.
• Custom Mobile-First Theme: Built a lightweight, fully responsive custom theme from scratch, optimized for Google’s mobile-first indexing.
• Optimized Content Architecture: Developed custom display formats for travel guides and articles, increasing dwell time and crawlability for search engine bots.
• Ongoing Growth & Maintenance: Manage continuous technical updates, performance tuning, and security patches to sustain search visibility and 100% uptime.

FestivalSeekers.com is a digital media platform dedicated to profiling festivals, events, and cultural experiences across Western Canada. Developed for Seekers Media, this project involved taking over the ongoing engineering and development of an established web presence that has been live in various iterations for approximately a decade.

Key Details & Contributions

Mobile Framework: Built and implemented a brand-new mobile theme to maximize responsiveness and optimize the content for on-the-go users.

Content & Display Engineering: Configured and deployed various custom displays to showcase event lineups, travel stories, and multimedia content dynamically.

Development Model: Structural updates, optimization, and feature development on this site are actively ongoing.

SnowSeekers.ca is an established digital media platform focused on skiing, snowboarding, and winter sports content in Western Canada. Developed for Seekers Media, this project involved taking over the ongoing engineering and development of a long-standing website that has been live in various iterations for roughly a decade.

Key Details & Contributions

• Mobile Refactoring: Architected and deployed a brand-new mobile theme to optimize the site's cross-device responsiveness and mobile user experience.
• Content Architecture: Developed and configured custom displays and layouts to present multimedia travel content, conditions, and snow sports stories more dynamically.

MyKootenays.ca is a dynamic regional tourism platform designed to showcase and promote the authentic Kootenay Rocky Mountain towns in British Columbia, Canada. 

Designed by Claris Media for Tourism Fernie as a simple, single-page Drupal 7 site, the platform underwent a complete architectural reconstruction. It has since been expanded and upgraded into a robust, modern Drupal 11 ecosystem.

Key Technical & Functional Highlights 

• Modernized Tech Stack: Completely migrated from Drupal 7 and upgraded through to Drupal 11 to ensure maximum longevity, security, and content management flexibility.
• Custom Responsive Design: Features a brand-new, fully responsive custom theme built from scratch to optimize site loading speeds, mobile usability, and seamless scalability. 
• Interactive Regional Guide: Serves as a comprehensive digital hub for travelers, offering community spotlights, curated road trip routes, and travel planning resources to highlight the culture, history, and natural beauty of the Kootenays.

This was developed to promote tourism in the Creston Valley/Kootenay Lake are of British Columbia.