Photography, Videography, Web Design & Development

Explore Summerside

Explore Summerside is the destination marketing organization for Summerside, Prince Edward Island, “The City by the Sea.” We designed and developed a destination website that brings the city’s events, local businesses, places to stay and trip ideas into one place, and photographed and filmed the Summer Sips Showdown to help promote the city’s events on social media.

A destination website has two audiences: visitors deciding where to go next, and the local businesses that rely on them. For Explore Summerside we built a site that does both. Visitors can browse what’s on, where to eat, stay and shop, and download ready-made itineraries, while member businesses get listings, packages and offers that put them in front of travellers. The event and member listings are easy for the Explore Summerside team and their partners to keep current, so the site stays as busy as the city it promotes.

Summerside’s events calendar is the heart of the site. Visitors can search by date, venue and tags, filter by category, from arts and culture to comedy, family-friendly, festivals, music and sports, or switch to a map view. Each event gets its own page with dates, times, venue details and directions, so planning a night out in the City by the Sea takes seconds.

The Explore section puts more than 100 local businesses in front of visitors, organized into places to stay, eat and drink, where to shop, things to experience and getaway packages. Each listing shows the location, offers and tags at a glance. A Join Us page explains the benefits of membership, from website listings and packaging opportunities to social media coverage and co-op marketing, and lets businesses sign up online.

To help visitors plan a full trip, the site offers downloadable itineraries in English and French, from active and wellness getaways to heritage, family and memory-maker trips. A Meetings & Conventions page makes the case for Summerside as a place to host business events, connecting planners with Meet PEI’s free event planning services.

For the Summer Sips Showdown, a month-long cocktail and mocktail crawl across ten Summerside restaurants created with Deep Roots Distillery, we photographed every signature drink and the bartenders behind them, and filmed vertical videos made for Instagram Reels. The content was used across Explore Summerside’s social media channels to promote the event and get the community involved.

Most visitors plan on their phones, often on the way. Every page is designed mobile-first, with events, listings and itineraries a tap away, and a language switcher in the header for French-speaking visitors.