Immerse yourself in Arizona's gorgeous landscapes and diverse cultures

Client: Arizona Office of Tourism
Location: Arizona, USA
Industry: Destination Marketing

Visit Site

As the official marketing organization for Arizona, the Arizona Office of Tourism (AOT) inspires more than 46 million travelers per year to experience its unique cultures and stunning landscapes. Ready to refresh its website with a more modern design, the organization partnered with Tempest to reimagine its online presence. The refreshed VisitArizona.com is powered by the publisher-friendly Craft CMS along with the iDSS CRM. 

Creative Discovery & A Road Trip

To kick off the project, Tempest conducted an on-site creative brief and discovery process to collaborate with and interview the AOT team and community stakeholders. Tempest's team also embarked on an epic seven-day Arizona creative brief road trip to really get a feel for the Arizona road trip experience. Since Arizona is the sixth-largest state by square mileage, we had a lot of ground to cover. Here are a few of the creative brief stats and highlights:

• 7 days
• 39 attractions
• 14 Cities & Towns
• 1,191 miles on the odometer
• 4 National Parks and Monuments (there are 24 total statewide)
• 1 psychic reading (when in Sedona . . .)

A Brand New Design

The discovery process and creative brief helped our team hone-in on a fresh and modern design platform that showcases Arizona's unique beauty. Stunning 3-D hero images highlight iconic sights, including The Grand Canyon and Horseshoe Bend, inspiring travelers by simulating the immersive feeling of exploring Arizona's wide-open spaces. 

Tempest also developed "Painted from Life" widgets to further highlight Arizona's artistic landscapes and illustrate unique contrasts such as winter and summer or urban and rural environments. These interactive widgets simulate "painting" by using two images and transitioning from photography to illustration. 

The new design leverages plenty of whitespace and a limited color palette, to allow the photography and imagery to shine. This clean, modern approach helps to maintain balance and ensures that important calls-to-action stand out and drive engagement. The website's typographic choices are meant to be as bold and iconic as Arizona, with powerful headline fonts that feel like they are carved into stone, paired with lighter serif subheadings.

Improved Content & SEO Performance

Using best practices in content strategy and SEO, Tempest was able to maintain and improve the website's performance post-launch. Since launch, overall sessions to the website have increased 38 percent, pageviews have increased 16 percent, and organic traffic from search engines has increased 64 percent.

The Tempest team used a content-first approach on the new website, elevating AOT's blog to the main navigation and empowering the AOT marketing team to curate and feature blog content throughout the website. As a result, organic traffic to blog content has increased by 297 percent post-launch.