Finally! An Easy Airport Website for Busy Travelers

Vela delivered an improved user experience in a clean, modern package.

How do you build a website for an airport that markets itself as the easy choice for harried travelers? By making the website easy, of course.

That’s the approach the Vela team took when Piedmont Triad International Airport (PTI) asked us to redesign its website.

The PTI-Vela relationship is a client-agency partnership that’s stood the test of time. Over the years, Vela has built several iterations of PTI’s website.

So when it was time to take on this latest strategic and creative challenge, we started our latest redesign with the airport’s key differentiator: Its ease of use.

After all, air travel is stressful enough – and the folks at PTI believe using their airport shouldn’t be. Hence, the airport’s slogan: “Fly easy. Fly from PTI.”

For travelers, PTI is the local airport that takes pride in being the user-friendly option to other airports in the region. It’s not too big and not too small, with a parking deck just steps away from the terminal. There’s even metered parking by the terminal for quick and easy passenger drop-off and pick-up. No traffic jams on and around the airport property, no waiting in lines to catch buses to the parking garage.

In other words, none of the hassles of the bigger airports in the region.

Putting Passengers First

We started out by reviewing industry best practices and completing a competitive analysis of similar-sized and best-in-class airports. We used that intelligence to take a closer look at PTI’s website analytics.

The analytics showed us that there were three distinct audiences who visited the web site regularly: passengers, operational teams and the aerospace sector. Because passengers were the dominant audience stopping by, we created an improved user experience especially for them.

Go to flyfrompti.com and you’ll find all the information you’d need for a trip right on the home page. Everything from live, real-time flight schedules, to current weather conditions, to a route map, to airline information, ground transportation, and lodging options. And this ease of use is aimed at all travelers: flyfrompti.com is fully ADA-compliant.

Making the Most of New Tech

The revamped flyfrompti.com features full-screen, aviation-themed backgrounds and super-crisp images.

The secret sauce in this project is a new technology called Scalable Vector Graphics files, also known as SVG files.

The beauty of SVG files is that they have really fast load times that don’t sacrifice image quality. This file format produces super-crisp images that look high-resolution but don’t take up tons of space the way JPG files do.

Thanks to the SVG file tool, this website is readable on all browsers.

Lift-off!

A great-looking, fast-loading, user-friendly website that’s readable on all browsers. Delivered by a creative team that’s positively obsessed with strategy. What’s not to love?

If you want to inject some serious strategy into your next project, reach out to Vela. We’d love to help you.