Lightwell is not a simple hotel– it’s an ecosystem. With 69 rooms, four dining concepts, a spa and soaking springs, group and retreat programming, and a full adventure partnership in the Columbia River Gorge, the website needed to function more like a small, thoughtfully organized digital campus than a traditional hotel website.

I partnered closely with the ownership and management teams to shape the full hospitality website strategy from the ground up. We started with deep discovery: building a wishlist of must-have features, reviewing best-in-class hotel and resort websites, and working directly with operations to understand how guests, groups, and staff would actually use the property and therefore how the site needed to function.

From there, I designed the full sitemap and page system, including:

• A modular Stay / Eat / Play / Relax structure and sub-structure

• Dedicated sections for rooms, packages, groups, spa, and experiences

• A homepage that balances emotional storytelling with practical booking flow

• A sitewide navigation and content system designed to scale as the property grows

Because the hotel itself was still coming to life, I designed the entire website using placeholder imagery and wrote placeholder copy to fully map content needs, hierarchy, and storytelling before final assets existed. This allowed the team to see and align on the complete digital guest experience early and make smarter, more efficient decisions about what actually needed to be produced.

I worked closely with the Developer to build the site page-by-page and template-by-template, and project managed the handoff to the copywriter, ensuring the final content stayed true to the original structure, UX strategy, and design intent.

One of the biggest challenges — and biggest wins — of this project was balancing many stakeholders: ownership, hospitality management, operations, food and beverage, spa, and adventure partners. The website became the place where all of those worlds had to come together into a single, cohesive guest experience.

The result is a calm, confident, highly functional boutique hotel website that reflects the beauty and intention behind the property itself — and gives the Lightwell team a scalable marketing platform they now manage, evolve and grow internally as the hotel grows. .

Hospitality Website Strategy
Hotel Website UX & Architecture
Sitemap & User Flow Design
Full Website UX/UI Design
Page Template System Design
Content Strategy & Wireframing
Placeholder Copywriting
Creative Direction
Booking Flow & Room Naming Strategy
Developer Collaboration & Build Direction
Copywriter Project Management

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Team: Tony Vanderzanden, VZ Tech SolutionsWebsite Development, Erika Oreskovich Copywriting, VIP Hospitality Management Group, and Gabriel Genauer, Lach Litwer and Carrington Barrs from the Ownership Team and now managed by ABD Creative and internal hotel teams

Featured Photography by: Lightwell Hotel + Spa