Rise Up Surf Retreats
Brand & Website Redesign, SEO
Surf Retreats in Central America
Year: 2024
Copywriting: Lac Campbell
Photos: Rise Up Surf
Have a look at their live website here.
Rise Up Surf Retreats offers all-inclusive surf and yoga retreats at different locations in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Barbados. They are known for their holistic surf coaching, laidback luxury in paradise and warm family vibes.
I planned, designed and implemented their 2024 brand and website redesign, including on-page SEO, a bilingual website and a custom availability visualization for their many retreat dates and locations.
Brand Redesign
A fresh standout and authentic design was needed for the Rise Up Surf brand. 2024 was a time of transition for Rise Up as a company, so our goal was to elevate their branding and online presence in general to be more authentic and showcase what they truly offer.
The redesigned color palette is warm and friendly, but still stands out and has a connection to the ocean and the vibes of a beautiful sunset surf session, which are some of the key aspects of the Rise Up Surf brand.
The new brand typography is modern, elegant and gives a hint of the laidback luxury you can expect at a Rise Up Surf retreat.
Overall, the new Rise Up Surf brand style is clean, subtle, outstanding but minimal. Wellness, adventure and (self-)discovery while surfing epic and uncrowded waves are at the heart of what they offer. That’s why their new brand design and website is simpler and cleaner than before, with a touch of modern luxury.
Website Redesign
The Rise Up Surf Retreat website is based on WordPress and has some custom post types for the retreat pages and for the retreat dates. It’s also bilingual (English and German), has a blog and several info pages about Rise Up and their projects. Overall, it was already a fairly complex website before the redesign.
My challenge was to simplify the site structure, reduce non-essential content, and improve usability in general. Rise Up’s main product – the Surf Retreats – needed to be presented in a clearer way to show that they offer high quality and personalized surf coaching during their retreats.
In the backend there were a lot of plugins that slowed down the site and caused errors from time to time. The Rise Up Surf website was even down a few times because of these errors. I reduced the number of plugins, changed the theme (Kadence Theme) and went back to the good old Gutenberg page builder (with Kadence Blocks as an extension) – which is a stable, fast and user friendly setup for a complex website like this.
Another major usability improvement is the new progress bars, that show availability for each retreat date. With an average of 5-6 retreats running each month, an easy and user-friendly way to show the remaining spots for each retreat on the website was needed. The new progress bar setup shows the availability in 4 levels (low, medium, last spots and fully booked), is directly linked to the retreat dates custom post type so it updates automatically and requires minimal maintenance.
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