Ewan Crosbie is an internationally award-winning wildlife photographer based in Costa Rica, launching his first guided expedition — a small-group, photography-focused trip across three ecosystems. He needed a page that felt like it was built by a photographer, not a travel agency, and that could carry future expeditions without a redesign each time.
Ewan came to us with a detailed written brief and his expedition's source itinerary — three ecosystems, a maximum of six guests, a Founder's Edition price point, and a clear instruction: the website should not simply reproduce the PDF. The photography needed to do the selling, not a generic "book your Costa Rica holiday" template.
The immediate goal was narrow and measurable: turn genuine interest into waiting-list sign-ups ahead of a confirmed departure date. The longer-term goal was structural — build the page as a reusable template, so a future expedition to a different destination could be created by swapping content, not rebuilding the site.
Three things made this more than a standard landing page build:
Rather than inventing a new visual identity, we pulled the palette and typography from Ewan's existing brochure work — so the new site reads as the same brand, not a rebrand.
Every photo slot on the page tries to load a real photograph by an agreed filename first. If it's not there yet, it shows a clean, labelled placeholder instead of a broken image. As Ewan sourced real photography, dropping a correctly named file into the images folder made it appear live — no code changes, no redeploy request, no back-and-forth.
A photo composed for a wide desktop hero often needs a genuinely different crop on a narrow phone screen — not just a smaller version of the same crop. We extended the same auto-detecting system to support an optional, purpose-cropped mobile photo per slot, falling back gracefully to the desktop version wherever one hasn't been supplied yet.
The original spec was a single email waiting list. Partway through, Ewan made the call that a direct WhatsApp conversation would close better for a five-figure trip than a form ever would. We rebuilt the CTA architecture around two distinct paths: WhatsApp as the primary "reserve your place" route for the live departure, and the email list repositioned specifically for people who can't make that date and want to hear about future editions.
The site now lives on a new subdomain of Ewan's existing domain — connected without touching his existing Squarespace site at all — via a GitHub-to-Vercel pipeline. Content and photo updates ship with a single push; there's no manual rebuild step standing between a change and it going live.
Real projects surface real problems. A few worth naming, because they're the kind of thing that separates a page that looks right in one browser from one that actually works everywhere:
The site is live at expedition.ewancphotography.com, connected to Ewan's existing domain, and collecting waiting-list sign-ups ahead of the Founder's Edition departure. It's a fresh launch — we'll add real performance and conversion results here as they come in, rather than before we have them.
“I'm really impressed with what Robyn's done with my expedition landing page. I gave her a fairly in-depth brief, quite a tight timeline, and she very quickly understood what I was trying to achieve and turned it into something that feels clear, professional and genuinely reflects the quality of the experience I'm offering. Robyn was also incredibly responsive throughout and turned everything around faster than we'd originally discussed. I've been so impressed that I've also requested Steady Drift to update my whole website to match the quality of the expedition landing page.
I'm genuinely proud to send people to the page, which is probably the best testimonial I can give.”
— Ewan Crosbie, Ewan Crosbie Photography
Real design thinking, real problem-solving, and a build you can actually keep updating yourself.