Hostelling International USA Website

July 2009

To be honest, I hadn’t heard much about hostelling until HI-USA contacted us last year, but it quickly became apparent that it’s a great way to travel if you want to meet new people, live spontaneously and immerse yourself in the culture of your destination. HI-USA was like most businesses: had a 3-4 year old site that things just kept getting added onto until the sitemap was disaster and styles weren’t matching anymore. And everything was image based so it was hard to maintain.

Fast forward to the launch of their new site. We meticulously setup all the HTML/CSS and Javascript so they could take these templates and put whatever content in they needed and it stay looking nice. Also, this design and code will be a boilerplate for all of their sub-sites to help them get up and running quickly and on brand. Even things like buttons and javascript tabbed content are easily added as the styles are already in place. Even more important, though is the clear and logical sitemap and navigation that helps the user find their way around the site. We had many discussions to make sure the flow of information made as much sense as possible. Add to that the semantic, text based information architecture and HI-USA should be seeing much much greater results from their new site. It was a long process, but we’re all very proud of how it turned out.

View the live site here →