Jet the World

Activities: website design + build

Duration: ~6 weeks

Partner: Rarefy (Brand)

With: Paul Brophy

Jet the World provides end-to-end private aviation and travel services to discerning clients. More than just an aviation company, they help their clients to master the skies through individualized service that covers the entire travel experience. Building off a rebrand that delivered brand strategy and a new visual identity, I worked with Paul Brophy to bring the new Jet the World brand to life through a new website, the first touchpoint in which most of their clients experience them.

For Jet the World, their website is crucial to client acquisition. Private aviation services are never one-size-fits-all, and thus it’s crucial to get potential clients connected with Jet the World as early as possible in the sales cycle. Though there was some early discussion of potential approaches to simulating this connectivity through tools like chatbots and “bookers” that suggested potential prices, I guided Jet the World to be very deliberate about the interactions on their website. “AI assistants,” for such a high-touch, high-price item risk obscuring the individual attention each customer receives.

I worked through a brief, two-week strategy and concept phase, before moving into a four-week detailed design and build phase. After the concept phase, I shared all design work in the live build.

Activities + Outputs

Visual Design + Branding

I extended the visual identity for digital applications, ensuring that the palette had adequate colors to handle UI elements like error states, etc.

I also built off the identity to create icons, and source images and videos to populate the site.

CMS design + implementation.

JTW’s prior site had been built with Drupal, and they’d struggled to handle even simple content update tasks. I used Sanity, a headless CMS platform that allows tight integration with NextJS, to give Jet the World a great content editing experience while still enforcing the kind of structured content that let me build a good experience for end users.

I made sure to lean into the Sanity capabilities here, providing their content editors with a single place to manage video, view and edit page layouts, schedule publication and more.

Build + Technical Approach

Crucially, Jet the World wanted to move fast. Their business is at an inflection point: unlike many private aviation charter brokers, Jet the World also has sizable investments in an aircraft fleet of its own. The costs related to operating, maintaining and growing this fleet made them hesitant to commit to a major website effort, particularly one reliant on lots of content that tried to make them seem all things to all travellers. In this, they wanted their website to be the exception to the classic ‘project management triangle:’ fast, cheap AND good. They wanted all three.

Recognizing the importance of speed, I proposed an approach that prioritized building a strong technical foundation that Jet the World would be able to evolve as their business needs—and service focuses—changed.

Contact forms

JET THE WORLD already uses several tools to manage leads and route them through the sales funnel. Rather than attempting to untangle all of those, I created a lightweight, platform agnostic approach to contact forms with an eye to future iteration. I wrote custom server logic to handle form submissions, and write submissions to a shared Google Sheet.