Web design / Louisville, KY
Fifty-one weeks and Derby week
The Kentucky Derby runs at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May, but the city starts celebrating weeks before. Thunder Over Louisville opens the Kentucky Derby Festival with fireworks over the Ohio River, and from then on, restaurants, hotels, florists, milliners, caterers and car services do a big share of their year in a short, chaotic stretch.
Most of their sites aren’t ready. The menu online is from last fall, reservations depend on a phone line nobody can answer that week, and the special Oaks Day brunch exists only on a flyer by the register. A Louisville hospitality site should let staff post Derby hours, packages and sold-out notices in minutes, then put the regular version back the following week. Menus and booking get their own treatment in our restaurant guide.
Bourbon country starts at the edge of town
Visitors come for bourbon too, and they spread out. Whiskey Row on Main Street has distillery tasting rooms right downtown; Bardstown, the Nelson County seat that calls itself the Bourbon Capital of the World, is less than an hour southeast; Shelbyville sits along the road toward Lexington. The businesses around that trade, tour operators and inns and shops and restaurants, depend on people planning a trip from somewhere else, usually from a phone, usually weeks ahead.
That calls for a different kind of site than one built for locals. It needs good photography, honest directions and drive times, booking that makes sense to an out-of-towner, and enough about the place to make someone choose your stop over the next one. Short clips from our motion and film work help here more than in most markets, because a rickhouse or a dining room sells better moving than still.
Across the bridges
The metro reaches into Southern Indiana: Jeffersonville and Clarksville in Clark County, New Albany in Floyd County, and Harrison and Washington counties beyond them. Plenty of people live on one side of the river and work on the other, so plenty of businesses serve both. If that’s you, say it plainly on the site, with Indiana and Kentucky licenses and service details kept apart wherever they differ.
On the Kentucky side, the places that matter for search are the ones people actually say: St. Matthews, Middletown, Jeffersontown, and out in Oldham County, La Grange and Crestwood. Bullitt County to the south has Shepherdsville and Mount Washington. Use the names your customers use.
The quieter economy
UPS runs Worldport, its main air hub, at Louisville’s airport, and the logistics, health care and manufacturing employers around the city buy from a long list of local suppliers. Those buyers want something else entirely: capabilities, coverage area, certifications and a fast way to request a quote. A website redesign for a firm like that usually means cutting pages, not adding them.
We work remotely, with no Louisville office, and keep the city’s Eastern Time (Kentucky is split between two zones, but Jefferson County sits on the eastern side). Before launch, whoever runs your site learns to update it.
Timing and the river
We want a new site live before Derby. When should we start?
Earlier than feels necessary. Winter is when your staff has time to review drafts and gather photos; by April, nobody does. We can’t name a date until we know the scope, so start the conversation around the new year.
Do our Indiana customers need their own page?
If they’re regular customers and the rules or prices differ, yes. A page for Clark and Floyd counties written for those customers works better than a line in the footer saying you serve Indiana.