Vacatia Resort
Sites
Every resort wants its own website. Nobody wants to design forty of them.
Vacatia manages resort properties, and the people who book them do not search for Vacatia. They search for the resort — by name, by city, by the thing they want to do when they get there. The company needed each property to be findable on its own terms, which meant each property needed its own site.
My Role
I was the only designer on both sites, start to launch — working alongside a project manager, an SEO consultant who set the page inventory, a copywriter and two front-end engineers. The sites are Parkway Orlando and Grandview Las Vegas. I worked from an SEO-led page inventory and marketing copy, and designed everything downstream of it: homepage, suite pages, resort experience and its sub-pages, location, photo gallery, shuttle schedules, blog treatments and three lead-generation forms, at desktop and mobile.
I also authored the component library both sites were built from, designed the global navigation pattern adopted across every resort.com property, and learned the engineering team's Tailwind breakpoint configuration so my designs mapped onto what they were actually going to build.
Designing a template,
not a website
Problem: The first site would set the pattern for every site after it, but nobody could say how many there would be or which resorts. Designing for an unknown number of unknown properties usually produces something so generic it serves none of them.
Solution: I separated what every resort shares from what makes each one itself. Structure, navigation, card behaviour, spacing and component logic became a shared library. Photography, content, amenities and the particular things a property is known for — a shuttle to the theme parks in Orlando, the pool complex in Las Vegas — stayed bespoke. Grandview reused about 70% of Parkway's component vocabulary, and the engineering team built a matching shared layer underneath so the pattern held in code as well as in Figma.
Designing for the build
Problem: Designs that ignore the build get reinterpreted during the build. I had breakpoints in Figma; the engineers had Tailwind's.
Solution: I sat with the front-end engineer and learned the actual configuration, which surfaced a real gap — Tailwind's sm: fires at 640px, so everything between 391 and 639 was inheriting mobile styles. I proposed a custom breakpoint at 390px rather than designing around the problem, and worked inside the real grid from that point on.
Mobile, because that is
where everyone is
Problem: Resort browsing happens on phones, in the evening, usually while somebody is already half thinking about a holiday.
Solution: Every template was designed at both breakpoints, with mobile treated as the primary case rather than the compressed one. After launch, 83% of traffic arrived on mobile.
Outcomes
Both sites are live. Since launch they have taken 45,896 sessions, 65% of them from organic search — the channel the project was commissioned for — at a 10% bounce rate against 25–38% for every other channel. Organic visitors stay five to six minutes.
The sites carry no booking engine of their own; they hand visitors to vacatia.com. They have sent 19,786 click-throughs, and 335 bookings worth $193,381 are attributed back to them. The three lead-generation page templates are still in service and have since been picked up for a separate growth initiative.
What I would do
differently
The homepage carries roughly 90% of organic entries on both sites, which means the blog articles and the localised pages are not earning their place — the best-performing article has taken 23 sessions. If I started again I would spend that effort on deepening the pages that do pull, and I would have agreed what we were measuring before the first page was designed rather than reading it out of the dashboard afterwards.
