Excited to announce that one of this year's design projects is now award-winning. The Canadian e-Tourism Awards recently released the winners for 2014, and my work designing the new website for White Oaks Resort & Spa in Niagara-on-the-Lake took home Best Website honours. The awards recognize innovation, creativity, and results in marketing Canadian travel experiences.

Winning the award is especially surprising considering the stiff competition. Typically, the Best Canadian e-Tourism Website goes to a lavish site for a Destination Marketing Organization and not an actual property (past winners include Tourism New Brunswick and Newfoundland & Labrador Tourism). Most of these DMOs tend to have sizable budgets and even provincial funding.

The majority of the entrants also tend to be produced by large agencies with whole teams of specialists working on them. A stark difference from one sweaty in-house dude handling about 90% of the architecture, management, design and development on the project. Ultimately, our goal was to produce a unique, clean, responsive and user-friendly hotel website that stands apart from other properties…so I would already consider it a success, but it's still always nice to receive an extra accolade. Special thanks to Andreas Trauttmansdorff for his great photography and Webonise Labs for their special feature development.