Skydive City

Creating a Client’s Vision

At the 2019 PIA Symposium, James La Barrie met DZ Co-Owners, Susan Stark and Joannie Murphy and was impressed. An all female-owned DZ is rare in skydiving and these two have earned the respect of their peers throughout the industry.

Susan and Joannie were in Dallas to pitch their vision to host the 2020 USPA National Championships while competing against experienced DZs like Skydive Chicago and Skydive Arizona. Their proposal was compelling and was enough for them to win the bid. It was clear that Susan and Joannie were putting in energy to elevate the Skydive City brand.

The DZ Marketing team wanted to work with Susan and Joannie because they are shaking things up. The opportunity came in January of 2020 with the request for a new website. We jumped at the chance!

The Design Challenge

Skydive City is not your run-of-the-mill dropzone and Susan led the charge to push our team to design a website that looked completely different than anything we’d designed.

The first challenge was working with a bright and vibrant color palette that pushed beyond the color palettes we’d ever worked with before! Our immediate challenge was to make it all work together without the palette distracting from the message.

While surely biased, we feel we worked it out into something unique, eye-catching and congruent with the “Z-Hills Style” that Susan and Joannie were wishing to have represented.

A Big Website for an Active DropZone

The Skydive City sitemap is considerably larger than many of the skydiving centers we’ve worked with because there are so many things happening at the dropzone. Many DZ websites are mostly focused on student operations and have a minimal buildout for experienced jumpers. This wasn’t the case with Skydive City.

With so many events, training camps, and the hosting of the US Nationals, Skydive City needed a site which would allow easy navigation for all its clients – tandem students, AFF students, spectators and licensed jumpers.

Because of the high page count, our design team thought it best to implement a “mega-menu” which is more visual and easy to navigate. At that time, the only other dropzone we’d implemented this feature for was Skydive Snohomish.

In Summary

The DropZone Marketing team is proud of this build. Behind the scenes our team spent 230 hours collaborating over this design, SEO, content writing (and re-writing), page layouts and client comms to get this site launched. This design is a step forward for our client and for us as an agency. Many thanks to Skydive City’s ownership for trusting us with their redesign.

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