You can visit this project’s site at puretraverse.city. The site is password protected. The password is ECCO2022!.
The Business Plan
In 2017 I took the reins of an event venue in Traverse City, Michigan called ECCO event space. The venue closed in 2019 because of flooding, but that’s another story.
While managing the venue, I developed a website on Squarespace to promote the business and handle rental inquiries. Squarespace was a great choice because its simplicity enabled me to easily add new pages as the venue’s business evolved. For example, I quickly added an online shop to complement a few art shows that I organized.
The website’s design reflects some of the esthetic qualities of the venue, and its minimalism stands in contrast to the websites of other local venues. In the Traverse City event industry, weddings are a big source of income. Many venues compete for a finite number of bookings. ECCO’s website highlights the differences between ECCO and comparable venues, which were mostly attached to hotels and vineyards. The websites of those venues tended to have a more decorative style.
Design Points
The ECCO website’s contemporary style not only reflected the venue’s “industrial” features—like its exposed brick and ducts, as well as its neutral color palette—but it also distinguished ECCO from the ornamental offerings of competing venues.
The home page caters to potential wedding clients. The page leads visitors through a short journey into the venue: first, visitors are welcomed to the site, then provided a visual understanding of the venue, and then encouraged to start a next stage of their wedding journey by contacting me. Elsewhere, “Contact” buttons and forms encourage potential clients to reach out for more information. Visitors learn some fast facts about the venue on the home page, but can navigate to other pages for more infor and photos.
The venue had great party juju. Over the years it had been a bowling alley, roller rink and teen club. The home page’s images capture the festive aura of the venue, and they are particularly colorful against the site’s minimal design scheme. They depict people having fun together, and allow site visitors to imagine themselves having fun at ECCO, too.
The site’s accent color, red, was inherited from the venue’s original signage, but it works well to vivify the site. Red also differentiated ECCO from other venues, which used more naturalistic colors like blue and green.
You can visit the full site at the puretraverse.city. It’s a domain I’ve owned for a while; I let the original (eccoevents.com) expire, and it now costs $2900 to get back (go figure).
A screenshot of the front page is below:
