In choosing at random in my bookmarked Favorites, I looked at the Seven Springs Mountain Resort site.  We went skiing there a month ago and in the interim, the site has been redesigned and also much improved.  I also ended up choosing it because it is truly a user site that needs to provide information (we booked a trip there based on a one-time recommendation and then purely on the info from the web site). To be effective, i.e., get people to go there, it really has to give the user what she wants, with a minimum of searching.  In fact, the site has no search function and I think they made the right decision not to provide one because you really can find all the information you want and find it easily.

You never have to go beyond three clicks to get to what you want, often just two.  Here’s a screen shot of the beginning of the site map, which clearly shows the layers

The home page actually functions as a site map because of the drop-down lists, and this is probably my favorite part of the site because it really provides the user with tremendous control and time savings by letting you see at a glance where you can go in each section, how far you have to go, all the options available, and also cuts out any extra clicking.  By keeping the top menu consistent on all pages, you can orient yourself the same way each time.  The picture at the top of the screen changes according to the content of the page, which is another design feature that helps orient you.  

In addition, the urls are well-designed.  For example, the following are the urls for the screen shot menu below. As you can tell, they are very consistent and easy to figure out.

They did a good job with the architecture because users will want to use the site differently.  For example, a day skiier or a local will care only about the skiing info, whereas someone travelling will want to know first about lodging.