Project Spotlight: Visit Elizabeth City

Client: Visit Elizabeth City

Project: Website Design & Development

Description:

Elizabeth City, North Carolina, is a historic waterfront community known for its welcoming culture, maritime heritage, and access to outdoor recreation. Competing within a broader regional tourism market, the destination needed a modern digital platform that clearly positioned Elizabeth City as a standalone travel destination while making it easier for visitors to explore, plan, and engage.

Our agency partnered with Visit Elizabeth City to lead a full website redevelopment focused on improving usability, storytelling, and long-term content management. The previous website had become outdated in both structure and design, creating friction for visitors trying to plan a trip while also making it difficult for the internal team to manage and update content. Our goal was to create a visitor-first platform that better reflects the destination’s personality while providing a flexible system that could evolve alongside the organization’s marketing efforts.

Several challenges shaped the strategy and development approach. These included modernizing the technology platform, simplifying navigation for trip planning, and ensuring the site met current accessibility standards. At the same time, the Visit Elizabeth City team wanted a more collaborative development process that allowed them to see the website take shape and provide feedback along the way.

Key priorities included:

• Reorganizing site architecture to support intuitive trip planning
• Developing a modern, mobile-first design optimized for all devices
• Implementing a flexible content management system for internal staff
• Meeting WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards
• Providing greater transparency throughout the development process

To support this collaborative workflow, evok developed the website using a staging-based, WYSIWYG development environment. Rather than building the site behind the scenes, we created a live development platform where stakeholders could view pages exactly as visitors would experience them while the site was still being built. This allowed the client team to review navigation, layouts, and content decisions in real time, resulting in faster approvals and stronger alignment between strategy, design, and execution.

The new Visit Elizabeth City website includes a range of features designed to support both visitor engagement and long-term content management, including:

• Fully responsive, mobile-first website design
• Custom WordPress CMS built with Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
• Modular content components for flexible page building
• Integrated events calendar with calendar and list views
• Structured partner content for attractions, dining, and lodging
• Social media and user-generated content integration
• Visitor inquiry forms with email marketing integration
• Managed hosting and post-launch technical support

With a recent launch, the project has already delivered meaningful improvements in content organization, navigation clarity, and internal confidence in the platform. The new site provides Visit Elizabeth City with a future-ready digital foundation designed to grow with the destination’s marketing efforts while delivering a more intuitive and engaging experience for travelers exploring North Carolina’s Inner Banks.