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Travel & Tourism

PartnersLewis Communications

The Greater Birmingham Convention & Visitors Bureau (GBCVB) is the official tourism organization for Birmingham, Alabama, promoting the city to leisure travelers, meeting planners, sports event organizers, and travel professionals. We partnered with Lewis Communications to rebuild the GBCVB website in WordPress, connecting it with the platforms they already use to manage local listings, events, and trip-planning content.

For this project, Lewis was recognized by the Web Excellence Awards for digital design work.

  • GBCVB
  • GBCVB
  • GBCVB

Challenges

  • 01

    Four Audiences, One Website

    GBCVB serves leisure travelers, meeting and convention planners, sports event organizers, and travel professionals, and each one is looking for something different. The old site sent all of them down the same dated, hard-to-navigate path.

  • 02

    Listing Data in a Separate System

    Every hotel, restaurant, attraction, meeting venue, and sports facility lives in SimpleView CRM, and pulling that into WordPress meant mapping categories, subcategories, amenity tags, images, and location fields onto the right post types. Get the mapping wrong and listings show up incomplete or go missing.

  • 03

    The Events Feed Was Inconsistent

    Event data came from ITI Digital through a separate API, and the fields rarely came back clean. Dates arrived as multi-day ranges, ticket links sometimes had several entries and sometimes none, and each quirk needed its own handling before an event could go live.

  • 04

    A Phased Launch Approach

    The build included over 50 page templates across two phases. Design deliveries, QA, and client testing windows had to line up so pages shipped in the right order without holding up the rest.

  • GBCVB

Solution

// Pixel perfection, always

We rebuilt the GBCVB site from scratch on WordPress, working from Lewis Communications' designs. SimpleView CRM connects through an API integration, so every hotel, restaurant, attraction, meeting venue, and sports facility shows up as a live listing and updates on its own when the data changes. Events flow in the same way through ITI Digital's API, with field mapping that sorts out the inconsistent dates and ticket links before anything reaches a visitor.

No existing plugin could do what GBCVB wanted, so we built a custom Trip Builder that lets visitors save their own Birmingham itinerary as they browse. The site went live in two phases: core pages first, then the audience hubs for Meetings, Sports, and Travel Pros.

Results

  • Listings That Update
    Themselves

    When something changes in SimpleView, it changes on the site, so the GBCVB team no longer needs to re-enter listings manually.

    01

  • Events That Hold Up

    We handle ITI Digital's inconsistent feed, so events render correctly on the site instead of breaking because of an unusual date pattern or link format.

    02

  • A Trip Builder, Built From Scratch

    Visitors can assemble and save their own Birmingham itinerary, a feature no plugin offered and the old site never had.

    03

  • A Unified Site for
    Four Audiences

    Leisure travelers, meeting planners, sports organizers, and travel pros move through one platform, each with a path built for what they came to find.

    04

  • 50+ Page Templates
    Rolled Out

    The new site launched in two planned phases, with more than 50 page templates built, tested, and released around GBCVB’s marketing schedule.

    05
Agency PartnerLewis Communications
Lewis Communications

Independent marketing agency built on data and creative

Lewis Communications is a full-service marketing agency with more than 100 employees. They build branding, creative, and digital campaigns grounded in their own business intelligence and data science, and they're a member of the global ICOM network of independent agencies.

  • LocationBirmingham, AL

  • Worked togetherSince 2024

  • Agency TypeIntegrated Marketing Agency