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Summary
How do the websites of the
10 Top USA Ski Areas compare
in terms of delivered Best Online Experience?
For this comparison we chose two East-coast (Vermont),
two West-coast (California),
and six Colorado resorts (including three front-range,
Vail, Brekenridge and Winter Park) and
three Western-slope destination resorts
(Crested Butte, Steamboat Springs and Snomass at Aspen).
Goals
For this comparative analysis of WebSites
we define two important dimensions that allow us to
rank order each WebSite in terms of Best Online Experience:
We used the eValid WebSite analysis engine, programmed (see below) to collect specific metrics that contribute to these factors. To assure accuracy the measurements were done over a short time frame and using identical access capabilities.
Results
The measurements made of the WebSites of
10 Top 10 USA Ski Areas
produced the relative Quality of Online Experience comparison chart shown.
For simplicity of comparison,
all the data shown are all normalized relative values.
![]() |
The best-performing WebSites are in the upper right of the chart, and the worst-performing WebSites are in the lower left of the chart.
Individual Summary Results
The table below shows all of the results used to construct
the comparative chart.
Click to see the eValid Summary Report with the raw data.
Click to see the 3D-SiteMap for each WebSite.
Here are Animations and
Usage Instructions for the 3D-SiteMaps.
Right-click anywhere on any 3D-SiteMap for documentation.
Here are some
Usage Hints if you want to dig deeper in the 3D-SiteMaps.
# | Company | Click For Summary Report | Comments | Click For 3D-SiteMap | Comments |
1 | Aspen Skiing www.aspensnowmass.com | eValid Report | B: Huge site (over 5000 links), slow and clean enough relative to its size. Well maintained. |
![]() | A+ Classic, easy to use structure with good spread and elaboration. |
2 | Breckenridge breckenridge.snow.com | eValid Report | A-: A large site, moderately quick. Well maintained. |
![]() | A-: Classic structure, but too much dependence from a small number of pages. |
3 | Crested Butte www.cbmr.com | eValid Report | A+: Fastest, cleanest, but smallest WebSite in the group. Very new content. Very good look and feel. |
![]() | A: Good spread, good connectivity, some backward links. |
4 | Heavenly www.skiheavenly.com | eValid Report | A: Large but not huge, rather messy but reasonably current. |
![]() | B-: Good spread out, some backward connectivity, but some cross-level links. |
5 | Ski Steamboat www.steamboat.com | eValid Report | A: Fast, but compact WebSite with no broken/unavailable links, very well organized. Well maintained. |
![]() | C: Strange structure from base, some backward links, "false base" page one layer down will confuse users. |
6 | Squaw www.squaw.com | eValid Report | A: Very large site, very fast, reasonably clean. Well maintained. |
![]() | A-: Near classical structure, good elaboration from root node but some second-layer links. |
7 | Stowe www.stowe.com | eValid Report | C+: A small WebSite, relatively clean and fairly fast. Not very well maintained. |
![]() | A: Very clean, simple structure, good elaboration, only one page below both the 1st and 2nd layer. |
8 | Stratton www.stratton.com | eValid Report | C: Very large (more than 5000 links), relatively messy and the slowest WebSite in this group. Well maintained. |
![]() | C+: Good structure (most of the broken links are in the top layer), but several secondary base pages. |
9 | Vail vail.snow.com | eValid Report | A-: Very fast, very clean, super large site (well over 5000 links). Well maintained. |
![]() | B-: good structure, but crinkled layering and too much linkage from some near-isolated nodes. |
10 | Winter Park www.skiwinterpark.com | eValid Report | B: Very large site (over 5000 links), very clean, but slow. Well maintained. |
![]() | B-: Clean structure, but two apparently independent layers from the base. |
Methodology
To collect the data used in the chart we used the eValid WebSite
analysis engine with parameter settings as follows:
Web Access Details
All tests were done on a 384 Kbps (peak performance value) ADSL connection.
The data was collected with successive eValid runs
during normal business hours.