Welcome to the new Website

April 7th, 2017 by Carl D
Gates of the Arctic National Park Alaska.

Backpacking trip to Arrigetch Peaks in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.

Hey Folks,

How about that? All shiny and new updated with code from this century and looking a whole lot better. Don’t you agree?

It’s been a while in coming, but I FINALLY got the website redone, from start to finish.

Design

I needed a responsive design for the site. Previously I had been using a separate website for the mobile version, which meant trying to update and maintain info and schedules and details on 2 separate sites. A recipe for disaster. It also meant visitors would often see two different versions of a page or pages and that doesn’t go over so well.

A responsive design means this one single version of the website adapts to screen size and operating devices. It’s pretty fiddly. It means images don’t always nest as I’d like them to, or display as sharply as I’d like them, or might be cropped and so on. But it makes things a lot easier to read on the phone all the way up to a larger 30 inch monitor.

It also means I went big. Wider, larger images look a whole lot nicer. I wish I could set it up so it’s only viewed on a 24″ or larger monitor. I’ve checked the site on my 15″ laptop, my iPad, my phone, and my desktop computer as well. The desktop wins. By far.

Hopefully the larger images load quickly enough for you. It’s a struggle trying to decide between smaller, faster-loading images and larger, sharper, more detailed images that look a whole lot better. I think these days enough folks have larger monitors that the standard 1000px wide screen is not the target to design for. So we went big. Let me know if load times are a hassle.

Structure

I also wanted to lay things out a little cleaner so you can find what you’re looking for easier. Both on individual pages and across the site itself.

One cool feature is the Explore Our Trips page where you can filter trips by various parameters. Activity type, location, difficulty, duration all seem to be important decision making factors for people looking to visit Alaska.

I added an array of new Photo Galleries, including galleries by location as well. This way if you wanna sit and drool over how awesomely beautiful Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is, you’ll find an entire gallery of images just from there.

I tried to balance a bunch of information for trips with not overloading the visitor. So having a feature to truncate sections seems to keep things cleaner.

I’ve included relevant and useful blog posts in to the FAQ pages (Backpacking FAQs and Photo Tour FAQs) so you can springboard right from your questions into more involved sets of information if you still haven’t found what you’re looking for. I think that’ll help a lot.

I’ve heard from folks before that they had a hard time finding a sign up sheet for the Newsletter subscription. So I tried to make that a little more visible across the site. I even built a special page just for that right here. Take a look

I wanted to feature the Videos a little more as well, so we built that section pretty big and added more videos to the collection.

I added contact links at the top and bottom of every page and also make “click to call” phone # across the site. So now you all have no excuse to not call me on my birthday and Say Hello! thumbs up emoji

Seriously, it’s always great to hear from folks, whether it’s an email or a call. I love hearing from guests who’ve come out on trips before. It’s also nice to chat with those interested in an Alaska adventure who haven’t been up this way before. So feel free.

Lastly, please do email me or post any feedback below if you see glaring errors on the site or things you’d rather be different. Positive and not so positive feedback is definitely welcome.

Thanks again, hope you’re all doing great, and looking forward to wonderful summer. I know we are here in Alaska.

Cheers

Carl

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