Northwest Rafting Company is a Hood River-based whitewater outfitter running world-class wilderness adventures on some of Oregon's most spectacular river systems. I'll be honest -- I took this project partly out of pure envy. If I can't be a river guide, designing their website is a reasonable consolation prize.

The Work

NWRC came to me needing a redesign of the group of websites their business depends on: marketing, booking, outreach, and education all running through their digital presence. Over three years of collaboration, I led work across nearly every aspect of their web experience: design, usability, mobile optimization, and search. The kind of long-term partnership where you stop being a vendor and start being part of the operation itself.

Takeaway

Outdoor and adventure businesses are chronically underserved creatively. They're out there doing genuinely extraordinary things and their digital presence rarely reflects it. Three years of iterative work on a booking-dependent website also sharpened how I think about design as a living system. The site had to keep working while we were improving it, which changes how you approach every decision.