Freeride Kosovo: A Cat Skiing Website for Guided Snowcat Weeks Above Deçan
A cat skiing website for a single-snowcat operation above Deçan, in Kosovo's Accursed Mountains, built around the trip, the terrain, avalanche safety and availability requests.
- Client
- Kosovo · cat skiing in the Deçan valley
- What we did
- Website
- Live site
- kosovo-freeride.com ↗
Freeride Kosovo runs guided cat-ski weeks from a single snowcat above Deçan, in the Accursed Mountains of western Kosovo, for groups of up to twelve skiers and snowboarders who travel in from abroad. We moved its cat skiing website off a page builder onto a custom WordPress theme, carried the old domain’s addresses across and organized it around four things: the trip, the terrain, avalanche safety and availability requests.
This case study describes kosovo-freeride.com as we checked it on October 24, 2026: twelve pages, five of them added in the rebuild, an inquiry form on six of them, and each old address we found redirected to the closest new page.
Who books a cat-ski week in Kosovo, and what they ask first
The buyer is a confident off-piste skier or snowboarder traveling from abroad. The week is built for a group of twelve, single travelers can join a group, and a partner agency in Austria also sells the weeks. The site is in English, and its practical pages are written for visitors: visa rules, the currency, the drive from Pristina airport and embassy numbers in Pristina.
Before anyone sends an inquiry, the same questions come up. The site’s FAQ answers seventeen of them, including these five:
No. The week is graded activity level 3, moderate-plus: confident off-piste riding in variable snow.
Yes. Transceiver, shovel, probe and airbag backpack are included and compulsory, and the first ski day starts with a search exercise.
Airport transfers, six nights, all meals, two guides, avalanche equipment and five days on the snowcat. Flights, insurance and your own skis are not.
The guide picks one of three zones each morning. If conditions stop skiing, there is an alternative program, and missed days are not refunded.
January to March, with 2027 dates set with each group rather than as fixed departures.
Search splits the same way. Someone who knows what they want searches for cat skiing in Kosovo. Someone earlier in the decision searches for skiing in Kosovo, what cat skiing is, or the Accursed Mountains under one of the range’s other names. Each of those searches needed its own page.
Where the Freeride Kosovo site started
Freeride Kosovo’s earlier website ran on Weebly at catskikosovo.com. By September 2026 the business had moved to kosovo-freeride.com, a WordPress site built with a page builder, with seven pages. Two gaps mattered most:
- No page was written for the broad search “skiing in Kosovo”. The homepage targeted cat skiing in Kosovo, a much narrower search.
- The old domain already redirected to the new one, but several old addresses pointed at pages that had never been built. The old article on the Accursed Mountains landed on the About page.
We rebuilt the site as a custom WordPress theme with no page builder, added the missing pages and pointed each old address we found at the closest new page.
How the twelve pages are organized
The sitemap lists twelve pages. Each one answers one part of the decision:
The homepage and the packages page: the seven-day week with five days on the snow, what is and is not included, and two shorter options for groups already in Kosovo.
The three zones above Deçan, each with its start and top elevation and a grade, plus a page on the Accursed Mountains and a guide to skiing in Kosovo.
What cat skiing is, the seventeen-question FAQ, and a before-you-go page with the activity grade, required and optional gear lists, the rooms, the weather and emergency numbers.
How to book in five steps, the booking conditions, and a contact page with the route from Pristina airport.
An About page on the company, its guides, the rules it runs by, and its accommodation and agency partners.
A stories page that gathers the explainers and the practical pages in one place.
The main menu carries six pages and a Check availability button. The footer lists the rest under Plan a trip and Read first, so every page is one click away.
A homepage in the order people decide
A skier booking a week abroad wants the whole picture before writing to anyone, so the homepage runs in this order:
- 1
The offer in one line: one snowcat, three zones, twelve guests, five days on the snow and the daily vertical target.
- 2
The week at a glance: length, what it covers, how 2027 dates are set and the group size.
- 3
The operation: local guides, one group at a time, everything handled from the airport.
- 4
The three zones, with start and top elevations and a grade for each.
- 5
The guided week and the two shorter options, what is not included, and what to know before booking.
- 6
The itinerary, one row per day, from the airport pickup to the flight home.
- 7
Guiding and avalanche safety, with the two guides and their roles.
- 8
Where the group sleeps: a valley hotel at 1,100 meters, then four nights at a guest house at 1,860 meters.
- 9
The inquiry form.
Safety written as procedure
The site describes what happens on the mountain instead of calling the trip safe:
A conditions assessment and a transceiver check before the group goes up.
An avalanche search exercise, so no guest uses a transceiver for the first time in an emergency.
The guide picks the zone each morning on the snowpack and the wind. Having three separate zones is what makes that choice possible.
Transceiver, shovel, probe and airbag backpack are provided and compulsory. Guests can bring their own.
Two guides lead each week, and one is a member of the Kosovo Security Force alpine search and rescue unit.
Required, and it must cover off-piste skiing, mountain rescue, emergency medical treatment and helicopter evacuation.
The terms are written the same way. Before its 21 numbered sections, the booking conditions page states the three things that catch people out: the deposit is non-refundable, the balance is due at least 60 days before the start date, and days lost to weather are not refunded. The daily vertical figure is a target that weather, visibility or avalanche risk can reduce, and the guide decides.
Availability requests instead of a booking engine
Freeride Kosovo sets each 2027 week with the group, so there is no calendar to sell from. The site asks for an inquiry instead and keeps it short:
On six pages: the homepage, packages, contact, what cat skiing is, skiing in Kosovo and the Accursed Mountains.
Only a name and an email are required. Phone or WhatsApp, where the group is traveling from, the trip, group size, rough timing and a message box are optional.
A dropdown separates the guided week, a private group, a single day, a single ride and anything else, so the reply starts in the right place.
No deposit is taken at this stage. Confident off-piste riding is required, and avalanche kit is provided.
The email address and phone number sit under every form, and a WhatsApp button stays in the corner of every page.
After sending, the visitor sees a thank-you message on the same page. Each inquiry is saved in the site’s admin with the page it came from. Spam is filtered by checks the visitor never sees, with no puzzle to solve.
Design and the phone layout
We kept Freeride Kosovo’s existing logo and built the look from it: near-black, white and the logo’s yellow-green, with Montserrat for headings and Inter for text. The photographs show the zones, the snowcat, the guest house and the valley hotel, several of them by Karolina Krasinska, who is credited in the footer. On a phone:
- The header stays at the top. On narrow screens the menu folds into one button that opens the six main pages, Check availability, the email address and a tap-to-call number.
- The WhatsApp button stays in the bottom corner on phones as well as desktops.
- The seven-day itinerary opens one day at a time, and the FAQ answers open on tap, so long pages stay quick to scroll.
- The inquiry form drops to one column, the homepage buttons run full width, and the payment table on the how-to-book page turns into stacked rows.
- Every image carries its dimensions, so pages do not jump as photos load.
Search work: a page for each question
The search work covered six things:
The two lift-served areas, Brezovica and Bogë, the season, why the western ranges take so much snow, and where the off-piste terrain is.
The range’s geography, snowfall and wildlife, with direct answers to the naming questions: Bjeshkët e Nemuna, Prokletije, the Albanian Alps and the cursed mountains are one range.
How it works, what it asks of the guest, and how it compares with heliskiing and lift-served resorts.
Each page is written around the search it answers, such as cat skiing packages, cat skiing gear list or book a cat skiing trip.
Every page describes the business with its Deçan location and coordinates, the packages page describes the week as a tourist trip, and inner pages carry breadcrumbs.
Sixteen old-domain addresses, from the articles to the store pages, and one older address on the new site each redirect in one permanent step to the closest new page. All 17 passed when we checked them on October 24, 2026.
Before launch we compared the trip facts with Freeride Kosovo’s 2027 package and terms documents and corrected three that older pages had wrong: the length of the week, now seven days; the daily vertical target, now 2,500 meters; and the company’s legal name, Freeride Kosovo LLC. The site also reports each inquiry to Google Analytics as a lead, along with form starts and taps on the email and phone links, so the operator can see which pages bring requests.
What carries over to another cat skiing website
Most of this carries over to other cat skiing websites and to small operators selling guided trips to travelers from abroad, such as ski, mountain-guiding and trekking companies:
- 1
Collect the operator’s own documents first, such as the trip sheet and the terms, and treat them as the source for every number on the site.
- 2
List the questions guests ask before booking and give the big ones their own page, including the searches that come before the brand: the country, the range, the activity.
- 3
Put a short inquiry form on the pages people read, with two required fields and a choice of trip.
- 4
Before switching domains, map every old address to the closest new page, and test the redirects again after launch.
- 5
Count inquiries, form starts and email or phone taps separately, so the operator knows which pages produce requests.
Our pages on website design, landing pages and conversion rate optimization and conversion tracking explain how we handle each part. Two related projects are written up too: Wander Balkans, a tour operator in Peja, and Freeride Albania, cat skiing on the Albanian side of the same range. One connection to declare: our partner Orest Qavolli is a co-founder of Wander Balkans, which runs the airport transfers and logistics around Freeride Kosovo’s week. The rest of our projects are on the work page. If you run trips and want a site built this way, send us your current site through the contact page. A partner replies within one business day.
Questions about this project
Why does the site take inquiries instead of online bookings?
There are no fixed departures to book. Freeride Kosovo checks the snowcat, the guides and the lodge against each group’s dates before confirming a week. A form that asks for timing, group size and the trip fits that process better than a checkout, and no deposit is taken until a week is confirmed.
Why write about skiing in Kosovo and the Accursed Mountains when the business sells cat skiing?
Those searches come before anyone knows the operator’s name. A skier choosing where to go next winter can search for skiing in Kosovo or the Albanian Alps without having heard of Freeride Kosovo. Those pages answer that skier, then end with the inquiry form.
What happened to the old website’s pages?
Each old address we found redirects permanently to the closest new page: the old Accursed Mountains article to the new range page, the old pros-and-cons article to What is cat skiing, the old store pages to the packages page. Google’s site-move guidance warns that redirecting many old URLs to one unrelated page, such as the homepage, can be treated as a soft 404.
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