2023Digital Business Awardspresented by ZeroToDigital

Owl's Nest is a beautiful resort located in the White Mountains that offers lodging and a vast array of activities such as golf and tennis. Often, websites that offer different types of content such as images and details for room rates, and recreational information, events, facilities and scheduling can tend to be a bit disorganized or cluttered. Not true for this website. The site is organized well between the different topics and includes complete and thorough content making it easy for visitors to find answers to their questions.

There are opportunities for improvement starting with SEO as they're overlooking valuable optimizations that would grow their organic, search engine traffic, and their blog posts - while including nice imagery - are pretty thin. They could also leverage the home page layout a bit better to differentiate and feature the many different services, amenities and packages they offer.

Bailey Funeral Home has been serving Lancaster and the surrounding area for more than 60 years and their website contained enough interesting and clever design attributes that we knew we had to include them on our winner's list for 2023. We love the way that the banner has a combination of small and large (blue) text, the fixed positioning of the images beneath the banner, and the internal pages with the banner and sublinks. There's also a good use of other functionalities throughout the site such as slide navigation via drag and language translation.

Despite the many clever designs, we think there are many areas where the font-face could be improved - headers being made smaller, smaller body text and thinner weight, and avoiding using the blue color as a background since it's a little too bold and contrasting from the rest of the site. We also think that the navigation should be simplified a bit and reorganized. We would use the main (larger text) nav for the most important services and products, and move the links such as "about us", "resources" and "contact us" to a small navigation perhaps at the very top of the page.

Beeline Skin Care creates hypoallergenic skin care products in eco-friendly containers. The website features 31 products in select categories and is well organized and structured, providing for a clean, user-friendly experience not often found in ecommerce. We enjoyed the various bee-themed design aspects throughout the site, such as the faded background of a swarm of bees, the hexagon outlines and mouse hover effects, the black and gold color palette and the silhouetted product images on dark backgrounds.

There are a few things that need to be cleaned up such as some HTML elements shifting when clicking on certain tabs and test product reviews not being removed. On the home page banner, we would add some sort of sub-headline beneath the main headline that reads "Beeline Skin Care Be Beautiful Naturally" to just provide a bit more context - something like what we described above regarding hypoallergenic products and eco-friendly containers that we found on the site's about page.

Douglas, Leonard & Garvey (DL&G) is a law firm supporting the people of Concord, NH and surrounding areas. I like multiple things about this website. The design has many unique features that you don't usually see - the Ovo font-family, the light brown and teal colors, and the interesting graphic elements joining the various content sections. The website looks professionally designed and fully custom at the same time.

I noticed at least a few accessibility issues (meaning that the site isn't super user-friendly to individuals with disabilities), such as between the light brown background and white text, some of the text might be too small (i.e. navbar menu links), and images missing alternate text description tags. I would also be more forward about the type of services that they offer. Currently, a user will see multiple calls-to-actions on the home page (which is good) but they're pretty vague, and the user has to scroll down a little too long on the page to find the list of services.

Lopstick offers a resort-like experience with lodging and guided activities in Northern New Hampshire. I'm including Lopstick in this list not necessarily because of the overall design, but because there are some interesting elements and functionalities used throughout the sort. For example, I like the logo and the use of the trees in the logo as a graphic throughout the site. They also leverage an accessibility plugin to help with their site (not the one we created, BitMtn, but another one). I also really like the full-width image grid on the home page. Businesses like Lopstick are selling the experiences as much as the lodging, so personal (yet, professional) images certainly help with that.

The rest of the design is a little underwhelming, however. There are a few issues regarding contrast between text and background colors (which is interesting since they're leveraging an accessibility plugin). There also appears to be some missing content. It looks like the site just needs some updating, and tender love and care to correct, modernize and professionalize a few components.

Jackson XC is a cross country skiing center located in Jackson, NH. Their website has a bunch of beautiful, aerial views of their ski trails and facilities, which both draws potential customers in and provides a sneak-peak for what they can expect when coming for a visit. They also provide a lot of information about their rates and lessons, and pictures of individuals and kids taking lessons which we find very helpful when trying to plan ahead. Finally, they offer a daily trail report so visitors can know the condition of the snow before coming to ski.

While we appreciate certain aspects, the website (which was built using WordPress) isn't custom. We can see many uses of templating and plugins leveraged by 3rd-party developers which might work to provide certain functionalities, but doesn't appear very professional. We also suspect that this has already or at least will lead to frustration in the near future when it comes time to making development and/or design changes to the site. We would like to take the existing functionalities and either integrating them better throughout the site or rebuilding them with custom solutions.

Camp Coniston is a YMCA children's camp. The website is fun and vibrant and packs a lot of information. We appreciated the bold colors that differentiated the various sections and the many, many images of kids and families enjoying activities at the camp. There's really nothing better that a website can display than happy customers enjoying their products and services and this website has plenty of that. There's also a lot of integration between this site and others for more advanced functionalities such as registrations and logins but the site does a good job at making it feel pretty seamless.

With all that is going on on the site, we think some additional differentiation could be helpful such as adding spaces and occasionally changing the weight of the font as everything can seem a bit loud after a while. There are also random blocks of text that don't seem to be clearly directing website visitors to different areas of the website to sign up or learn more about an activity.

Revival Kitchen & Bar is a restaurant serving old world classic dishes located in Concord, NH. For some reason, restaurant websites are typically underwhelming. We've been wanting to include a few in this list, but it's been very difficult to find ones worth including. This website by Revival is unlike the others and contains elements that we think are interesting and useful to users. For example, seeing multiple, full-width pictures of the venue. Often, the first time you visit a restaurant you have no idea what you're stepping into. We appreciate the opportunity for a sneak-peak. Also, quality photos of the food. We also like that their menu is right on the home page for quick and easy scrolling and browsing.

Although we like a lot of the pictures, some of them are a bit low-resolution and out of focus. Having quality images can be a simple way to make a website really stand out, so we would recommending swapping out the low-quality ones with high-quality alternatives. There's also the opportunity to make reservations, which is great, but we'd also appreciate information about if reservations are necessary, or if/when there are times that are busier than others and should be avoided. For example, my family is 6 people so we often avoid going to restaurants without having confidence that we'd be able to get a table within an hour.

McGray & Nichols designs and builds custom homes in the Lake Sunapee area. The design of the website is simple while the images of their previously-designed homes pop off the screen. The images are large, professional and keep your eyes glued to the site for longer than anticipated proving how beautiful their homes are. We also really like the font family used on the website which adds a bit of elegance and professionalism.

We would consider taking a look at the "start the process" user journey. Currently, that is just a link to the generic contact form which asks for the typical information. It's fine to have a generic form, but we'd recommend this gets tweaked a bit for users looking to "start the process". They could do this by altering the form and asking for specific information that would be relevant to actually starting a project, or providing some options that they could choose from. Additionally, the conversion rate of these form submissions might improve if some social proof is added to the journey (i.e. next to the form) such as testimonials from previous, happy customers.

The Inn at Thorn Hill is a local inn, restaurant and tavern located in Eastern New Hampshire near Mt. Washington and North Conway. The website features a large, bright image of the inn upon first visiting, and it's not diminished behind a dark overlay with text as is normally the case. There are also multiple call-to-action opportunities for booking and gift certificates which is good - tell the visitor what you want them to do. Also, many of the images on the internal pages contain a border overlay with the page's header text among the border which we think helps tie the pages together with consistency.

We'd like to see the first page visited, when browsing the rooms and suites, to contain more complete data. The page acts as sort of a brief preview of the different options, but not in a way that one could truly compare the various rooms and suites, or be any closer to being able to make a decision. When clicking through to the individual rooms, it's nice that there's a description and a few pictures, but we'd like to see this expanded with additional pictures of the room as well as the common areas.

Great Glen Trails offers outdoor adventures in all seasons in Northern New Hampshire. Some businesses offer a lot of recreational activities, but many of them don't productize their offerings in a clear and concise way like Great Glen Trails does on their website. A user can quickly and easily scroll through each of the opportunities and see schedules and prices and booking information all in one spot. Having all of the information in one spot makes it easier for me, the user, and prevents me from clicking away and finding an alternate recreational company when I can't find what I'm looking for.

Since Great Glen Trails is selling experiences, we would focus on sharing the experiences of others using Great Glen Trails in a more high-quality way. For example, there are videos on the site, but they are very low-resolution so I think it actually deters users ("if their website is low-quality, would their experiences be low-quality as well?""). We would attain high-quality videos and use larger imagery throughout the site. But it's important to do this without making it more difficult for the user to quickly and easily find event and booking information.

SNHU (or Southern New Hampshire University) Arena is an event venue located in Manchester, New Hampshire. Their website is bold and vibrant which fits nicely with their goals of promoting exciting activities and selling tickets. They do a good job of featuring the materials likely provided to them by show producers with large event image banners and 5 of them displaying above the fold when you first visit the home page. It's also easy to purchase tickets to events with the ticket info and purchasing links appearing in prominent places on individual event pages.

We think that a few adjustments would really make this website even more professional. For example, we would do away with the social media plugins appearing on the bottom of every page. Social media is a promotion tool and should be used to bring users to your website. But once their there, don't send them away! They also clutter the page a bit. We would also remove the calendar block at the bottom and integrate the calendar and links in the header - perhaps in a small ribbon at the top with a full calendar page that can be visited. Finally, we'd tweak many of the event buttons - it's a bit confusing when there are reactions to the mouse even when it's not over an active link, so we'd clean that up.

Littleton Regional Healthcare is a healthcare facility serving New Hampshire's North Country and Northeast Vermont. We think that their website does a good job of providing information about their services, even sharing bios and images of doctors who specialize in certain areas. We also appreciate that they produce new content on their website (news/blogs) on almost a weekly basis. Content, in our opinion, is the best strategy for search engine optimization, so we believe that this will help them in the long run.

While we recognize that Littleton is trying to help users find where they're trying to go when landing on the home page via the "How can we help you?" links and navigation, we think that they need to make this the priority for the top of the home page. In the past, websites would be primarily informational. But today, an effective website should be much more than that such as a sales tool that funnels visitors into customers. We would remove the "about", "careers" and "ways to give" links from the top of the home page and use the first few sections focusing on what the typical user would want to see - services that are offered and how to attain those services.

The Eagle Mountain House & Golf Club offers lodging, dining and golfing in the northeast region of New Hampshire. The website offers stunning drone-taken views of the amazing Jackson Village location, nearby mountains, the golf course and dining facilities upon first visiting the website. There's also a helpful and noticeable call-to-action to start the booking process for staying at the facilities. There are also credibility-building logos in the footer displaying awards that Eagle Mountain has won in the past for their service.

We would like to see the home page built up a bit more to include multiple images of the lodging options and golf course to continue with the nice video at the top of the page. You've intrigued the user at this point, so build on that momentum and convince them to go ahead and book already! The individual room pages should also be expanded to include a bulleted list of all included amenities and larger images. There are also a few other design elements that could be added to take this website from being a good website to an amazing website, such as the font family, navigation animations and padding, and more expanded landing pages for specific services such as weddings.

Birchwood Credit Services works with lenders to provide credit reporting services. We love websites with unique style elements and appreciated the various shapes, lines and angles that pop out at you on this website. There's nice, positive video footage in the background of the banner on the home page, and the blue, orange and white colors accent eachother really well. There is also some animation and interaction further down the page that comes across as very professional which we think adds to the Birchwood brand. Finally, they offer many downloadable resources and require users to first sign up to get them which allows them to capture new leads.

While there are design elements that we do like, there are others that stick out to us at those belonging to a template that is likely used by dozens or hundreds of other websites, so this is not a completely unique or custom build. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes things difficult when you want to make design tweaks here or there. We also think Birchwood would benefit by having a content creation strategy that isn't just news about the company which is what we see currently on the site. In their industry, it would pay dividends to provide free, educational content in hopes of growing their website and free, organic traffic.

Nordic Village Resort offers beautiful lodging near the many recreational opportunities located in Jackson and Northern New Hampshire. Their accomodations are much more than your typical hotel experience, and the beautiful video at the top of the site's home page reveals that and more. The site integrates multiple high-quality videos and images seamlessly with content and information about the property, amenities and booking information. We also like that they even make room at the bottom of the home page to share images of people experiencing life at the resort.

The large video on the home page is excellent, but we'd consider putting some sort of call-to-action somewhere on the page - probably small-ish in one of the corners. Maybe in the form of a brief tagline with one or two important links. We would then remove the gift certificates section further down the page, and put a section containing a few images of the rooms and content and links to room information. While amenities and location are great, the typical person spends a lot of time in their actual room on vacation so that is very important.

The McLane Middleton Law Firm has multiple locations in New Hampshire and Massachusetts and serves clients by offering a vast array of services applicable to nearly any business or individual. The websites comes across very professional with high quality videos of local New Hampshire and Massachusetts buildings, nice use of a serif font, cleanliness and simplicity. They have a well-organized top navigation to the many services they offer and industries they serve, and even payment functionality for their clients.

McLane Middleton is definitely going for "credibility" on the home page of their website as every section is about their firm, the people at their firm, their firm's recent news and career opportunities at their firm. Building credibility is definitely important, but we find that it generally is more effective to focus on the products or services that you offer clients. So, instead of "here's some information about us", consider something like "is your business struggling with ___? Here's how much you could benefit by leveraging our service for ___."

The Colby Insurance Group offers different insurance options to the communities of northern New Hampshire and Vermont. They have a website that contains a lot of information but in an easy-to-digest way. Sections are clearly separated with proper white space, colors and icons. There are also various images and videos that help to make the business more relatable. They also offer and have a clear call-to-action for a mobile app that can be used by users to view and manage their insurance packages.

There are some adjustments that we'd make to the website to make it more effective, however. For example, we'd move the "About Us" navigation link to a less-prominent location (it's currently the first main nav link) since we want to get our services in front of potential customers ASAP. Also, since they offer many different types of insurance, we'd want to make sure that each quote request form is handled individually. For example, depending on the type of insurance, specific questions or inputs are requested and submissions get forwarded to the right people. Setting this up could save Colby a lot of time going forward.

Palmer is a gas and oil distributor that delivers to and services Southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts. I like how their website contains text with large, bold font, and the attitude of the individuals in their images isn't too serious, but rather fun. They also have a robust navigation menu at the top of the page so users can find what they're looking for quickly and easily.

We would suspect that Palmer doesn't have someone on staff who is comfortable with web development because certain aspects of the site are not utilized well. For example, the home page banner/slider is simply a collection of images - with the text being part of the image. This often doesn't provide a good experience for users with disabilities and users on smaller devices. From a user journey perspective, we would start the home page with information about deliveries (rates, schedules) and services, and then promote other things like information about Palmer further down the page.

Peniel Environmental offers cleaning, repair and restoration services to homes and businesses in the New England area. The website checks a lot of boxes when it comes to being a business trying to capture local customers - there's a visible phone number at the top, a contact form mid-way down the page, a lot of call-to-action language throughout, logos of familiar businesses that use their services to build credibility, and customer reviews. There are also obvious links for applying for financing, making payments and emergencies. Finally, we like the use of drop-down menus through the site in uncommon places such as when the mouse hovers over an image - that's a really cool touch!

While a lot of basic SEO components are well taken care of, there are also a lot of things that need to be cleaned up such as properly using headers (i.e. H1) and optimizing image alternate text. There's also a lot of content that's repeated from the home page on interior pages which is both unnecessary but also a bit disruptive if you're an actual user browsing the website. We would also recommend some sort of content creation strategy - a blog exists but appears to have been abandoned. Content creation is one of the best ways to improve and grow organic search engine traffic.

Lahout's is a clothing and ski retail store located in Littleton, NH. They have a Shopify ecommerce website to sell their merchandise and clothing, and I put them on this list as much for how their merchandise looks on the website as the website itself. I love the simplicity and clean lines and fonts. I also like how they focus on their products and let them stand alone as silhouetted images rather than always having the merchandise on people, or in an image with other items. I also appreciate how they've leveraged many of Shopify's site functionalities without leveraging ALL of them (which often clutters and slows down websites).

The shop and individual product pages and nice and simple, but the home page might be a little too simple. The text that displays on top of the banner carousel slides doesn't really add much to the experience. We'd try to make that copy a little more intriguing to get the users to click. Also, we'd move to display some shop items quickly after the banner instead of having the large block about Lahout's. That would make sense maybe more simplified and further down the page - perhaps integrated with an image somehow. Finally, since this is an ecommerce site and users are able to make purchasing decisions, we'd focus on adding some additional calls-to-action to attempt to convince a user on-the-fence to make a purchase.

Appcast creates software that helps business with their staffing and hiring needs. Their website is very eye-catching with animations that complement their overall messaging. They also leverage existing software for accessibility, sales and customer service which, we're sure, helps them to better utilize their site and visitors. They also do a great job of capturing new leads for their sales team via an opt into a report they put together for recruitment. Lastly, they include many screenshots and graphs from their online platform which is very helpful for SAAS and software companies.

The website is missing out on many foundational SEO components, however, although they do better than average at labeling images with alternate text. They could also take their lead generation to a new level by leveraging scroll, banner or exit-intent popups to attract users even further. Finally, our preference would be that they include some sort of signup or at least display pricing prior to requiring that users sign up for a demo. We find that can often be a bit intimidating to a company considering the service and cause them to turn away.

Colonial Village is an apartment home community located in Manchester, NH. After looking at so many sites, we appreciated the bold font we were met with on Colonial Village's website. It's large and exciting which makes sense because they're starting off with a nice promotion at the top of the page for new residents. I also like how they have a secure portal for current residents - allowing them to schedule maintenance and be part of an online community.

On the home page banner or hero image, there's a date input with a "search" button. We think this is a little vague. We would suggest adding some context to the call-to-action such as indicating that potential residents can search for vacant units starting at that date. We would also try to give users of the site a sneak peak of the individual units somewhere on the home page. Currently, there's an image of a unit at the top, but perhaps adding another section near the top displaying floorplans and/or an image grid would be helpful. That's what potential residents are most interested in when considering apartments.

EVR is an advertising and marketing company located in Manchester, NH. There are many interesting and unique features of this website. First, when you visit the site you're met with a sort of title page that contains a message before showing the main site. The navigation is animated and hidden behind a hamburger menu icon. And the page backgrounds change color as you scroll down the page.

As interesting as the various unique elements are, we'd consider making a few adjustments such as not requiring the user to see the title page again after seeing it the first time. You could achieve this by leveraging cookies or even sessions. We like the look of the articles appearing at the top of the home page, but having that first delays the message to the user - what you want them to do, how you want them to act (i.e. reach out about a new project). For example, the featured article on the home page currently is "Culture Matters" which is great, but what does that do for me if I'm looking for a new website?

Truvay Travel Design is an agency that helps families, couples and individuals plan and organize their next vacation. One of the first things we noticed on the website is that the beautiful pictures we see are not stock photography, but actual images from clients who have traveled to different places around the world. That builds terrific credibility and I'm sure the individuals featured feel special as well. The site also uses white space very well, letting you settle on different statements without being immediately distracted or thrust into the next piece of content.

It looks like the website hasn't placed much of an emphasis on search engine optimization, so we would recommend improving the website by starting there, and also the navigation could be expanded a little to include more understandable and direct links to different pages or sections of the website, such as starting new vacation plans, happy clients, example travel packages and more. We would also be careful about changing the background colors so drastically and messing with the user's scrolling abilities. This can cause accessibility non-compliance and even be a little irritating to some users.

Carpet Mill Flooring sells and installs a vast array of floors in Lebanon and the surrounding area. They have a very large inventory of different carpets, tiles and wood but their catalog pages are laid out nicely with Amazon-like product filtering options. Our favorite part was definitely the functionality their site has to allow you to select a material, upload a picture of a room in your house and then see how the new flooring would look in your house! You can also change the paint color of your walls and temperature of your lighting.

This site has a lot going on, and most of it is good, but we think that there are a lot of components that could be improved with some development. For example, we can see that some sort of plugin has been installed to place Pinterest pin links on all site images. The problem is that it's adding itself to all images, even ones that maybe aren't ideal for sharing on Pinterest. Also, feature to see how the flooring would look in your room is cool, but it's very slow and not well integrated with the website. We would keep the main site's header and footer at the very least.

Sugar Hill Inn is located in beautiful Sugar Hill, NH and offers accomodations and dining. There are a lot of lodging and recreation companies here in New Hampshire, and Sugar Hill is another to make our list. On this website, we like the clean lines and section breaks, consistency between image sizes and variation of colors and shading. We like that the images used are getting the majority of the space on the home page, but it's combined with text to provide clear context and direction to users.

The images at the top of the home page are the most influential, but many of them are not a very high quality. We think that this could actually deter users who want and expect a top-notch experience. The footer section is interesting with the background image of the mountains, but there are some clear contrast issues between the background and text that we think should be cleaned up from an accessibility standpoint.

Creare is a manufacturing company in Hanover, NH that specializes in innovative technology and product development. The Creare website does a great job at being direct and getting right to the point with its visitors - expressing what they do, the exact services they provide and the benefits to their clients. They also have a large site navigation that allows users to get to pages and specific sections of pages in one click.

From what we can see, Creare works with and produces some pretty amazing things, so we'd like to see that replicated with imagery and videos on their website. We would take their website in slightly-more "techy" design with graphics and animations, all while staying true to their current direct messaging.

Red River is an information technology company helping businesses setup and optimize cloud and managed services. Their website is well designed and fits the IT industry well being primarily dark-themed with technological graphics while still being attractive appealing for non-technical users. They also do well at supporting their services with educational materials such as videos and blogs which is important for any business offering technical services.

The site does well at focusing its content on its primary services with its primary keywords being used at a high rate in the page content, although the images used on the site are often either missing alternate text altogether or should be made more descriptive and, therefore, more accessible. Finally, Red River isn't doing much with lead generation on their website. We would recommend other opt-in opportunities in and among their many resources to land new prospects.

Martha E. Diebold Real Estate helps home buyers and sellers in New Hampshire and Vermont. We appreciate the great use of colors both in the logo as well as in the images used on the site, the fonts accented by a nice cursive font, and the overlapping section graphics that help to tie sections together. I also like that she has a list of links for "recommended searches". This prevents the user from having to think and come up with their search idea on their own, preventing possible confusion or inability to find what they're looking for.

There are a few ways in which the website could be improved and even modernized a bit more. One of the things we'd look to do would be to both decrease the size of the icons on the individual property pages, and swap some of them out for some slightly less obvious ones. Let's face it, we're bored of seeing some of the same icons after a while. There are new icons that have a slight design flare to them that could be considered and make the site feel less "templated". We would also encourage them to consider some sort of content creation strategy so that they could increase the amount of URLs they have indexed in search engines and grow organic traffic to the site.

Dolan Real Estate connects buyers and sellers in Sunapee, New Hampshire and the surrounding area. Real estate websites can often be hard to manage, but we really like this site for a few main reasons. First of all, the individual listing pages are part of the main site, not located on a 3rd party site. This is great for both SEO and for adding/controlling further customizations and functionalities. Also, we love that the listings feature market data for the local towns including property taxes, median prices, school information, etc. The site also includes individual town pages which is great for both SEO and users and they include information about the town as well as relevant listings.

There are many great things that this site is doing for search engine optimization, however, we're concerned about the site's strategy for adding their pages to search engine indexes. We see an updated sitemap.xml but no evidence that any pages have been indexed by Bing, for example. We don't have the ability to see Google's index for the site. We also don't like how the large banner with search functionality and large footer with tabs and links repeat on every page since it can get in the way and be annoying for users who have already seen it. It'd be great if these appeared fully expanded on the home page, or the first time a user visits the site but then minimizes to a certain extent.

The Loon Preservation Committee is a non-profit loon habitat located in Moultonborough, NH. If you're interested at all in loons or wildlife in general, this website has a lot of great content. From their appearance, diet, reproduction, development, even the sounds that they make and what a certain sound means. We love that they've taken this information and run with it to produce a really neat and helpful resource. The website also features many beautiful images of loons in their habitats, and a poem!

The information about loons is great, but it's difficult to know that you can actually go and visit "The Loon Center" Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, and there are actually in-person events that you can participate in. Having 4 homeschooled kids, we'd love to participate in these events, but if, as a user, you're not willing to dig a little bit on the website you'd never know that you could visit in person. I would try to integrate information and imagery about visiting the center on the home page - especially if that's a way for the committee to raise funds!

Celdara Medical is a biotechnology and medical research company helping to bring innovative new solutions to the health industry. We're suckers for a simple and clean website like this one with interesting shapes and curves. They also leverage stock photography that looks fairly natural and good, contrasting colors. Their blog posts are very well search engine optimized with quality headers, title, descriptions and image alternate text tags.

We think that the site can be improved by creating a clear call to action message upon visiting the site. We can investigate what they offer to the industry, but not directly how we could leverage their expertise. We would also recommend additional call to actions to other important pages or lead generation opportunities so that the site isn't just a hub of information but also a business generating asset to the company.

LaValley Building Supply is a home improvement company offering a vast array of related products and services to homeowners. Despite having a very large website (over 4,500 search engine indexed pages), the design is very simple and modern, and it's easy for users to drilldown to the different pages without getting overwhelmed. The design also makes good use of animation to add a nice flare to the site and a positive impact to LaValley's brand image.

Despite the number of indexed URLs, many of the pages are thin - sometimes displaying only a brand image and link to a manufacturer. This may be fine for their purposes, but if the pages were established more with additional text then they could produce dozens or hundreds or more search engine ranking opportunities for the website. Also, since most users land and start on the home page, we'd recommend utilizing this page a bit more to feature 1 or more of the most profitable products or services that they offer.

Bear Rock Adventures offers lodging and a variety of recreational activities for all seasons in Northern New Hampshire. Their website's color palette of green, gray and white is perfect for their brand, and we love the badge or sticker design of their logo with the mountain and forest. They use the top of their homepage well with an important message about their upcoming services, and then get right into the various services that they offer to customers. We appreciate how they do this before spending much time talking about themselves because users are typically on a mission to find what a company can do for them first and researching a company second.

We think that a few components of the site could be extended a bit. For example, where they have links to their services on the homepage, we'd like to see them make the images a bit larger with some additional text previewing the service. Instead of just "Snowmobile", add something about what you offer - snowmobile rentals, guided tours, sales? We think this could be leveraged in other parts of the site as well. Also, the links in the navigation bar could be cleaned up a bit. Maybe remove the "about us" links and link to those pages in an "about" section further down the home page. Then move "shop" and "book now" to a ribbon at the top of the page. This would allow for a greater focus on links to your most important pages.

The Hotel Concord is a luxury hotel located in the capital city of New Hampshire offering lodging, meeting space, a restaurant and theatres. Their website is classy, sophisticated, offers high-quality images and keeps them interesting with different sizes and positioning. There's also a nice video at the top of the home page showing a customer's journey from walking in the door to staying in one of their rooms (we think she looks like Julia Roberts). Finally, we like the call-to-action that you see when first visiting the site that offers a 10% discount when booking direct.

We would look into finding a different servicer for handling the room reservations, or perhaps even handling this directly on the website because the 3rd-party site doesn't offer a consistent user experience. We like that they have a blog featuring different things to do in the surrounding area, but the posts are really thin leading us to believe that they're probably not doing much for them. We would recommend that they focus on fewer posts but longer-posts. Put the effort into creating fewer but higher-quality posts on similar topics.

The Mountain Club on Loon offers lodging, meeting spaces and recreation in Lincoln, NH. The website does a great job of getting right to the point with the valuable statement "Loon's only slopeside resort for all seasons". That tells you both who they are and what they do. Then, directly after, they get right to featuring their services in an organized way by type (lodging, dining, etc.). This makes it easy for a user to take the next step. We also appreciate how they double-down on their home page and have repeat links to some of those same pages but with slightly different pitches - featuring images and available packages.

We love the messaging and design of this site, but there are a few things that could be improved. We would reduce the amount of bolded font that is currently being used - especially on the smaller, body text. It can make things a bit difficult to read and might not be very accessible to individuals with disabilities. We would also reduce the size of the contact form a bit. Large forms can be a bit daunting and actually deter the user from completing it. We'd remove a couple of the required fields (at least not make the phone number required) and reduce the spacing between the input fields a bit so it doesn't take up as much space.

Lodestone Biomedical is a biotechnology company creating innovative products for the medical industry. Their website is what you'd think or hope it might be for a technology company, featuring a dark theme with network and internet-related graphics. They also display beautiful, silhouetted product images, graphs, datasheets and videos throughout that display or explain complex solutions.

Their design is very catchy, and hiding the navigation menu behind a popup menu is interesting, but it can be a tad confusing as to where you are when browsing the website. This is sometimes resolved by adding a sort of "breadcrumb" banner that shows where the page you're currently viewing fits in with the hierarchy of the site, or, more commonly, by displaying a more traditional top navigation of page links. We also think that the pages are a bit thin on text. This could be resolved by explaining the content of the videos (or even datasheets) in text form on the actual website.

Summit on Juniper is a residential community for Dartmouth College graduate students. The website is loaded with amazing photography featuring the many amenities, social and business opportunities that would be available to residents and, to be honest, it's very enticing! They also feature beautiful floor plans of their apartments, helpful search and filtering functionalities, clear pricing and, again, brilliant pictures! They also utilize accessibility software making their website easier to use for people with disabilities.

We see only 1 URL for the website indexed in search engines which tells us that they haven't spent much time considering the benefits of SEO for their website. And, for all of their wondering images, none of them are optimized for search in terms of being compressed (which improves page loading speed) or including alternate text (which is also a must for accessibility). Lastly, while it's nice to have a lot of content available on the home page, we would recommend keeping most of it but moving some of the functionalities or details to subpages to improve performance and increase the number of index-able webpages for search engines.

Bio X Cell is a biotechnology company that provides antibodies for medical research. Their website features an expansive navigation menu, online shopping capabilities, lead generation optins, account management and call to actions for receiving quotes. The site receives quite a bit of traffic and is ranked highly on our list of top-ranked New Hampshire business websites in terms of traffic.

Online stores with a large inventory are often hard to keep looking nice, and this website does a pretty good job, but we would recommend adding a bit more white space to the catalog, contrast the size of the headings, regular text and pricing, and maybe give the shop category links a bit more space so they don't get lost with the text leading into the catalog pages. We would actually recommend more space (i.e. white space) to other sections of the site as well including the header (maybe simplify) and the scrolling banner images at the top of each page. Finally, it's great that the store is on the primary domain, but we'd recommend doing that with the blog as well. It's currently on a subdomain but having it on the primary domain would be better for SEO and design consistency for users.

The Woolly Thistle is a yarn shop selling various yarn and kits locally and online. They have a well-established Shopify website that they use to sell online and also take advantage of other functionalities such as allowing users to filter items by many different categories, save a wishlist, login to participate in courses, buy giftcards, preorder items and more. They also build credibility by featuring many customer testimonials. The site is well designed with nice fonts and contrasting colors with images and organized with a large but simple navigation.

The website has most of the basics covered, but we'd recommend a few changes such as the logo, for example. The logo itself might be okay, but the issue is that it's a vertical logo in a horizontal space in the top navigation making it shrink and appear underwhelming. We'd suggest making a horizontal alternative. It would also be a good idea, on the product or checkout pages, to share a note suggesting the security of the online purchase and if they offer any sort of refund or not. Finally, on the blog posts featuring videos, it would be good for search visibility to include more text as a summary or preview of the video.

Snyder Donegan is a Real Estate Group helping buyers and sellers in New Hampshire and Vermont. When you first visit the website, you're met with a very interesting video featuring many beautiful scenes from New Hampshire and Vermont, activities, venues and homes. It really sells the idea of living here! They also feature their ability to market your home which is a unique angle - perhaps targeting higher-end properties - instead of just generally helping buyers and sellers (although it looks like they do that as well).

We're nitpicking because this is a great site, but we'd look to modernize the icons being used for one thing. There are many more sleak and modern looking icons available these days that could really add more to the site - especially the individual property pages and header. We'd also slightly differentiate the styling between the main navigation links and the top links (contact info, login, signup) just to add a contrast. We would also consider making the image slider at the top of the property pages move automatically, at least until navigated manually.

Saint Anselm College is a Benedictine college located in Manchester, NH. They have a website containing many webpages and URLs explaining their school, education philosophy, class offerings, student life, events and more. I put Saint Anselm on this list because I really enjoy their website's use of accent colors, overlain buttons and copy, and interesting shapes. I also appreciate how they've customized many interior pages to have unique navigation headers - minimizing the large logo to save space above the fold, and integrating the page's header/title.

Upon investigation, I was expecting the website to be built using WordPress, but it's actually built with Drupal. There are a lot of sections and design aspects that, while interesting, look a little templated. By that, I mean one-size-fits-all or what might come with a website template sold to hundreds or thousands of people. To take a website to the next level, custom design components really help a site stand out. A few examples of this are the font families used (they currently look a little thin and may be less than ideal on a webpage), accordion menus, social/instagram feed and icons.

Upton & Hatfield is a law firm serving businesses, families and individuals in the Concord, NH area. Their website is very unique in that it contains a lot of familiar website content, but in a way that is custom, well-integrated, and feels more like a high-quality designed PDF than a webpage. I think a lot of this is because of the design between the sections, the background texturing and impactful color overlays. As you scroll down the page, there are also nice simple but interesting animations that bring the site to life.

The website does a lot of things well, so it was difficult to find some constructive feedback. We would fix some of the spacing of the text on the interior and blog pages. When there are situations of having a lot of text, it makes it easier for the user to scan when it's a bit more spaced out, and HTML "decorations" are limited. Currently, there are list items where the line height appears to match the space between each list item, so they kind of run together. As far as HTML "decorations", make sure that headers are easily distinguishable but limit the bold and italic fonts to only important or impactful text.

The Crown Tavern is a restaurant located in Manchester that produces creative and unique menu options. Their website caught our attention with the beautiful images of the restaurant's interior, bar with shiny tiles and a nod to their history. We appreciate their inset (non-full-bleed) design and the integration of reservation functionality into their website.

While nitpicking a bit, there are a few design tweaks that we'd make to this site. We like the lack of a background to the navigation at the top of the page, but there are times when it overlaps the white background below hiding a few of the links. Also, on the menu page, the "dinner", "dessert" and "cocktails" tabs aren't very obvious (that they're tabs) and we're wondering if the individual menu items could be made a bit smaller which would make it easier for users to browser many options at one time. Finally, we'd recommend considering combining a few of the relevant pages. For example, can we work the "fellowship" or "roots" pages into the home page somehow?

Kimball Union Academy is a private school located in Meriden, New Hampshire. The website features the familiar colors of the fall leaves found in New England, scrolling animations and nice images. They also utilize a user-friendly calendar for the many school events which is something that most educational websites struggle with and a lot of helpful information about enrolling in Kimball Union and specific course information.

Kimball Union leverages a lot of existing digital software which is a great shortcut for any business or organization looking to add capabilities, but we wonder if they're getting to the point where it might make sense to bring some of these in-house. For example, the form to request information takes us to a 3rd party website and we can tell that the form isn't very consistent with the Kimball Union website. But, as with any 3rd-party software or plugin, you're often limited as to the customization options. We would recommend that they perform an audit on all of the digital software they're currently utilizing (including website, monthly cost, level-of-effort required) and see if it would make sense to hire a developer to move any of these functionalities in-house.

Lake Life Realty is a team of realtors connecting buying and sellers of properties in central New Hampshire. I enjoy their website because it's focused on life - life happening, people, families - and really getting to the heart of real estate, we're looking for homes and properties within which we can do life with our families and friends. The images and videos are great, and the design leverages good white space making it easy for users to quickly scan the website without feeling overwhelmed.

They have a lot of different functionalities on the website (such as a Facebook messenger chatbot) which is great, but many of them are competing with eachother and don't feel very integrated. For example, the "Free home value report" form, which is a Google form, is clearly embedded from another source (Google), and the YouTube video below could be enlarged and styled a bit. And while I loved most of the imagery, I think it would be wise to take a break from the large, full-bleed images on some of the interior pages as it may cause fatigue amonst users.

The Lost River Gorge is a family-friendly attraction and recreational opportunity to explore the river and caves in the mountains of New Hampshire. Their website is very well designed, integrating beautiful photography of the river with tasteful graphics, text and buttons to important pages and information. The information needed for first-time visitors is very easy to find, they make use of other platforms to offer an online store and booking services, and establish credibility by including logos for other relevant organizations in the footer of the site.

We don't have much feedback on the design other than there are a few pages with a fair amount of text that could be better sectioned off by including additional images, white space or bolder headlines, and there are a few components that look "plugged-in" to the website that don't quite match the high-quality design that the rest of the site has such as the contact form in the footer. We would also recommend creating an actual webpage to replace the sitemap.xml file on the "Site Map" page. The XML file is necessary for search engines, but for users an actual well-designed and searchable (or categorized) list of webpages would be better. But we're nitpicking - this is a great site!

Montcalm Golf Club is a golf course and semi-private golf club located on the western side of New Hampshire. The website is beautiful in that the text and HTML elements step back so that the amazing images of the golf course can stand out. We also appreciate how some elements are random or not perfectly balanced (such as overlapping text and different-sized images) which keeps the site interesting. The page transitions are a nice touch and there's a good amount of content supporting the internal pages.

There are a few contrasting issues on the site, specifically with the white text on some of the background images and the green logo on the black background. This is the difficulty with image over text - you don't want to darken the image but sometimes you have to so that the text will be visible - especially to individuals with disabilities. There's also some confusion with text or elements having mouse hover effects leading one to think they might be able to click a link that's not present. Finally, the footer isn't well-utilized. There are social media links which is fine, but it's also a good opportunity to list some of the site's other internal links.

The Woodstock Inn Brewery is a restaurant, pub, lodging and event venue, and they have a beautiful website. They gracefully leverage many high quality images on their website, showcasing their food, rooms and events but in a way that is still clean and very user-friendly. They also have a modern-looking logo and font-face utilized on the website. Finally, they have a link to order takeout on their website which makes it easy for the user although the linked-to site isn't very modern-looking or user-friendly.

There are opportunities for the site to improve its SEO - optimizing important components such as the title tag and headers. They appear to have a regular blogging schedule but the posts could be better keyword optimized as well. But because of the design, the user-friendly status of their site and the fact that they at least have a content creation strategy, we've decided that they're more than worthy of a 2023 award.