Shepherd Creek Ranch

About

Shepherd Creek Ministries is owned and operated by Glenda and Lloyd Brown in Kendalia, Texas. They allow guests to come and stay at their ranch to use as a retreat center for church and other Christian events such as hosting guest speakers, religious teachers, authentic dining, etc. They needed a site that would allow them to publish their events, display their location, and receive potential guest requests for quotes directly on their site.

The meta goals of the website

Outside of satisfying the requests of Shepherd Creek, their website needs to work effectively at gaining interest. Starting off, the point in having retreat centers like these so far removed and away from the city really is to disconnect and to take in the nature around you. This needed to be conveyed on the site.

Secondly, the processes that enables clients to communicate directly with the owners of the ranch is important. They are not interested in operating at large scale. Instead, they would rather build strong relationships with both their visitors and potential visitors.

Accomplishing the meta goal

To increase the interest in the Shepherd Creek ranch as a retreat center, high quality photos were taken of the location, the surrounding ranch, and the owners. These photos are used throughout the site to give the viewer a sense of the destination. On the home page, a blurred video of a steaming river plays on a loop in the background. This is designed to be an eye catcher for when someone first visits their website.

In order to ease the friction in having the owners access messages from their client, I hooked up a form submission on their page that must be filled out and sent directly to their email addresses, as well as a Google doc that they can use to track follow ups with their customers.

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