Camp Canaan

In 2024, we embarked on Camp Canaan’s exciting website redesign project. We kept the original site design elements that we all loved and were still serving the organization, and implemented a number of improvements and upgrades that would meet their needs going forward:

• Enhanced media capabilities
• Improved site navigation
• Integrated pricing tables
• Updated design
• Refreshed, reoptimized copy

Camp Canaan engages discrete audiences with a wide variety of adventure activities and program offerings. The campus is sprawling and vibrant – words alone cannot capture the beauty of the mature tree canopy, the vastness of the river, or the sophistication of their equipment, programming and facilities.

By incorporating high-quality video, Camp Canaan comes to life! By adding the flexibility of featuring videos on internal pages, Camp Canaan’s most discerning constituents – parents – are able to gain important insight into camp life and activities.

The diversity of audiences that visit the Camp Canaan site and the multitude of offerings they can choose from required a thoughtful redesign of the site’s navigation.

We introduced a user-friendly “mega menu” with distinct categories, intuitively leading visitors across the site to options relevant to their customer type. By shifting from a list of activities to a customer-centric presentation, the site feels more personally engaging and less transactional.

Most of the activities on offer at Camp Canaan require advanced booking. Keeping rates and dates current was tricky for the Canaan team in the past – so many moving pieces! We created a much simpler way for the client to manage the information and created robust table displays. Now, end users are able to ascertain which dates are open, closed, or waitlisted at a glance.

Our designer, copywriter and project manager spent the afternoon at Camp Canaan, personally experiencing the campus and asking a whole lot of questions. With that first-hand experience, we were able to infuse the spirit of Camp Canaan into the vibrant new site.

Custom graphics, dynamic layouts and carefully-selected photography showcase the professionalism and playfulness of the organization. Previously text-heavy content was transformed into consistently-presented informational tables and visually engaging “image cards.”

Easter eggs – like Grundy the catfish in the footer and references to “the coast of Rock Hill” – add a layer of authentic personality that makes repeat visitors to Camp Canaan feel right at home.

The new web copy needed to convey a lot of information quickly and succinctly – not only to improve the user experience, but also to reduce the volume of inquiries to staff.

Expanding the FAQs page and embedding the most relevant FAQs on Summer Camp pages was a specific initiative in this effort. Another was to add a dedicated page for parents to log into their account. Clear instructions for self-managing common tasks drastically reduce the number of emails and calls into the Canaan office.

Analytics from the original site were paired with fresh keyword research to inform the SEO strategy for the new site. The site is now fully optimized for the constituents served at Camp Canaan and the activities on offer.