Bringing the Blue Sky City to Life Online: A New Website for Tourism Calgary

Project Details

Tourism Calgary is the official destination marketing, sales, and development organization for Calgary’s tourism industry, promoting the city locally, nationally, and internationally to leisure travellers, businesses, and major event organizers alike. 

Paper Leaf partnered with Tourism Calgary, alongside brand partner ZGM, to move visitcalgary.com off an aging platform and rebuild it as a single, scalable hub that could serve leisure travellers and business audiences side by side. Since launch, we’ve continued to work with Tourism Calgary on an ongoing retainer, evolving the site’s search experience and event integrations.

The Quick Take

We ran a discovery phase to understand audiences and map out a technical path forward, then rebuilt the site on Laravel and Statamic with simplified navigation, distinct experiences for leisure and B2B audiences, and a deep integration with Tourism Calgary’s SimpleView CRM to keep thousands of partner listings and events in sync.

The result is a website built to grow with Tourism Calgary — one that’s earned a Gold AVA Digital Award and nearly tripled its monthly traffic since launch. Through an ongoing retainer, we continue to evolve the site’s search and events experience, keeping it aligned with how Tourism Calgary’s audiences plan and discover trips today.

Problem Statement

Tourism Calgary’s previous website was built on Drupal and was struggling to keep pace with a growing organization serving very different audiences — locals, regional day-trippers, domestic and international travellers, and meeting planners weighing Calgary against other convention cities. Dense navigation, buried content, and weak relationships between pages made it hard to discover more of the site, especially for mobile visitors, which for Tourism Calgary was about 80% of all website traffic. Lastly, site performance was dragged down by third-party analytics and tracking tools that had been added on over the years.

What We Did

Discovery

Our discovery work focused on two goals: improving the experience of key tasks, like finding out what’s happening in Calgary, planning a trip, or qualifying Calgary for an event or convention, and evaluating the technical stack behind the scenes. Our research activities included:

• Current-state analysis and mapping.
• Analytics review, to help inform the structure of the new site.
• Comparative analysis of sites like Destination Vancouver and Visit Banff & Lake Louise.
• Technical research into existing systems, including syncing, API integration, and exporting fields from the current CMS/CRM (the tool was planned to remain the CRM going forward, but lose direct CMS access).
• Audience and user research, including tree-jack tests for each pillar (leisure, meetings & events, and industry), to understand how locals, regional travellers, and business audiences actually used the site.
• A new information architecture, sitemap, and roadmap for future features and functionality.
• Early design mockups incorporating Tourism Calgary’s newly rolled out brand strategy.

Our research surfaced a clear set of barriers standing between Tourism Calgary and its visitors:

• Dense, confusing navigation that blurred the line between B2B and leisure content.
• Weak content relationships that made it hard to serve tailored experiences.
• Third-party tools dragging down page performance.
• Fundamentally different needs between Leisure and B2B audiences — one built for open-ended exploration, the other for quickly qualifying Calgary as a destination.

Altogether, this confirmed the direction forward: simplified navigation, clearer content relationships, and a platform that could scale with Tourism Calgary as the organization grew.

Design & Build

We rebuilt the site on Laravel and Statamic, a platform built for managing structured content and the relationships between listings, events, and stories. The new site is a single destination hub for the Visit Calgary website, with the root domain serving leisure audiences and an easy toggle in the main navigation letting business and meeting audiences switch into content built specifically for them.

A major piece of the build was a deep integration with Tourism Calgary’s SimpleView CRM, which manages partner accounts, events, and membership details. We built syncing so new and updated partner listings and events flow automatically into the CMS, with in-CMS notifications for admins when a listing needs attention, alongside a one-time migration of existing partner and event content.

We also redesigned the site’s information architecture and navigation from the ground up, built out standardized page-builder components so the Tourism Calgary team could manage content independently, and optimized the experience for the mobile-first majority of visitors.

Key features of the rebuilt site include:

• Simplified navigation with a dedicated interest switcher for leisure vs. B2B audiences.
• Two-way syncing with the SimpleView CRM for partner listings and other important data sources.
• An events landing page and calendar.
• Robust site search & insights powered by Algolia.
• Standardized page-builder components for flexible, self-managed content.
• A fully responsive, mobile-first experience.

Ongoing Enhancements

Our partnership with Tourism Calgary has continued well past the site’s August 2025 launch, with ongoing work centered on evolving search and events.

In 2026, we assessed how Algolia was performing on visitcalgary.com, then rebuilt it into a unified, site-wide search experience — consolidating every content type into a single global index, surfaced through a new search results page with typo tolerance, synonym mapping, and query suggestions. Alongside this, we integrated the visitcalgary.com events calendar with Tourism Calgary’s Seeker Events Network via API, giving visitors a better way to explore, filter, and navigate civic event listings.

Most recently, we implemented an author attribution system to strengthen the site’s authority in AI-powered and LLM-based search — reflecting how people increasingly turn to AI tools for trip planning and travel advice. The system introduced reusable author bio components and dedicated profile pages, making authorship and credibility explicit across editorial content to build trust with both visitors and AI-driven search tools.

Outcomes

The original rebuild gave Tourism Calgary a single, scalable platform to serve both leisure visitors and business audiences. Simplified navigation, a mobile-first design, and tighter CRM integration make it easier for visitors to find what they need and for Tourism Calgary’s team to manage content, partners, and events in one place. And the work paid off, the project was recognized with a Gold AVA Digital Award for website design and user experience. 

That same collaboration has carried into our ongoing retainer work, where we continue to align closely with Tourism Calgary on new enhancements and priorities. What began as a design and build project has grown into a long-term partnership, with both teams committed to delivering long term value as Tourism Calgary’s needs continue to evolve.