A mountain club website has two jobs guests will not forgive you for getting wrong.
They need to know, in a few seconds, whether the place is open. Trails, lifts, weather, base. Not a leftover “snow page” from the last redesign. And they need to move around the rest of the site without getting stuck in the menu.
Windham Mountain Club was in a brand refresh with Studio Villa. The live site still had to carry that language. Desktop navigation is hamburger-only on purpose, so the overlay is the whole menu, not a backup. The old snow report still felt like last year’s page. Those two surfaces are what people hit on almost every visit. Events, FAQs, the rest of the refresh could wait. These could not.
We rebuilt the mountain report as a dashboard: large blocks for trails, lifts, temperature, and base, the same module on the page and in the slide-out so the two never drift. The numbers still come from the systems that actually know the mountain, not from someone typing a lift count into WordPress. In early September the public page read 0 trails and 0 lifts, 71°F, a 12″ base. The mountain was closed. A leftover snow page would rather invent a prettier number. Guests who trust conditions pages notice the difference.
The menu had to match the new brand while the rest of the refresh was still moving. Guests get the overlay, not last year’s header. Casey Garraghan after it went live:
It looks so good Justin, thank you again for your speedy work on this. We’ve been getting so many compliments already. The transition from the 3 lines to the X is also beautifully done!
A guest who lands today can trust the conditions page and get around the club. That is the job. Windham has it.