13 town hub pages. A Gemini-powered AI itinerary planner. A daily newsletter covering all 13 hubs every weekday. The only free AI trip planner purpose-built for the Lake District — designed, built and deployed by Cascade Digital.
The Lakes Planner is three interconnected products working as one ecosystem: a hub website of Lake District town guides, a free AI day-planning app, and a daily newsletter. Each one feeds the others — and together they form a single, growing tourism platform rather than a static brochure site.
The brief was deliberately ambitious: build something genuinely useful to visitors, not another generic tourism website design dropped onto a template. It had to earn its traffic, not buy it — and give people a real reason to come back.
It also had to clear a high bar on two fronts. It needed to feel as beautiful as the region itself — proper Lake District website design, photography-led and unhurried — and it needed to rank against national travel brands with far bigger budgets. That's the same standard of craft we bring to every web design in Carlisle project, scaled up to a platform built to compete nationally.
One platform, three products — each designed to do a specific job and hand visitors on to the next.
Thirteen town hub pages covering the Lake District's most-visited destinations — Ambleside, Bowness-on-Windermere, Buttermere, Coniston, Glenridding (Ullswater), Grasmere, Hawkshead, Kendal, Keswick, Penrith, Wasdale Head and Windermere among them.
Sitting at /app/, this is a full React + Vite + TypeScript web application powered by Google Gemini 2.5 Flash. Visitors tell it their group type, interests, start location, budget and time available — and it returns a personalised, genuinely readable itinerary.
A free Monday–Friday email sent at 7am via Beehiiv, written for people who live in and love the Lakes — not recycled tourist-board copy.
Travel website design in the UK is brutally competitive at the top — so we didn't fight there. We went hyper-local, where the data showed real volume and almost no competition.
All 13 hub towns' "things to do in [town]" keywords sit at KD 0–3 — winnable searches the national platforms overlook.
Around 18,000 searches a month at KD 0: the single largest traffic opportunity on the site. The kind of edge we engineer into every web design in Keswick build.
Every hub links to all 12 others, building a tight authority web across the whole Lake District.
All pages submitted, sitemap.xml live, and the content architecture structured to grow — new guides plug straight into existing authority.
The right tool for each job — fast static hub pages, a modern React app, and live data piped in from real APIs.
The Lakes Planner brought together design, search and content into one platform built to grow.
A bespoke multi-product tourism platform — hub pages, a React AI app and newsletter integration. Ambitious web design built from scratch.
Explore our web design →Every page built around real keyword data — KD 0–3 targets across all 13 Lake District hubs. Data-led SEO services from day one.
View our SEO services →Content architecture and editorial strategy to attract and retain organic traffic — the backbone of our blog and content writing work.
See content writing →"The target keyword for the AI planner — 'plan my day lake district free' — is completely uncontested in search. We built the only thing competing for it."— Peter, Founder, Cascade Digital
From tourism and travel to trades and services — Cascade Digital builds web platforms that rank, perform, and scale. Based in Carlisle, working with businesses across Cumbria and the UK.