The Coach House Skipton
The Coach House has been an insitution in Skipton for several decades, but until very recently had not had a website! Most of their room bookings come from third party sites such as booking.com, but there was no way for customers to book directly online - losing valuable profit margin.
The Coach House Skipton
The Coach House has been an insitution in Skipton for several decades, but until very recently had not had a website! Most of their room bookings come from third party sites such as booking.com, but there was no way for customers to book directly online - losing valuable profit margin.
Analysis
This is where most projects screw up by being too vague. We needed to define the key stakeholders for this project. After some key research, we decided they included:
- Hotel managers
- Marketing team
- Guests (via feedback).
Core goals:
- Increase direct bookings (cut out third-party fees)
- Improve mobile experience.
- Showcase rooms, amenities, location & events.
- Integrate with a PMS (Property Management System)
User stories:
- As a guest, I want to book a room easily from my phone.
- As a manager, I want to update room info without a dev.
Design
The Coach House had a variety of printed and branded materials available, so most of the branding was already completed. It was up to me to ensure the typography and spacing appealed to as wide a variety of clientele as possible.
A staging site was setup so the client could keep upto date with changes and give feedback whenever they liked.
The most important takeaway from this stage was that the call to action for booking rooms was really clear.
Development
I decided to use WordPress, and a pagebuilder theme called Flatsome to build this website. This is an option for our brochure sites where something is needed quickly, and it is individual pages rather than templates for content. This is something we can discuss at the requirements and design phase as to whether that is an option for your business.
The hotel staff can make quick changes whenever required on all content and images, and the site is securely linked to the PMS to be able to take room bookings.
Conclusion
Following throrough testing including:
- Functional testing: Booking works, forms submit, calendars sync.
- Cross-browser/device: Looks perfect on iPhones, tablets, old Chromebooks, etc.
- Performance: No one waits for a hotel site to load.
- Security
We could deploy the site. This client has chosen a support plan to enable BVSWebDesign to be able to look after the site, monitoring uptime and security, as well as providing all emails and super fast hosting.
Once the site was launched we also migrated emails over to our server. The site is performing nicely and taking bookings weekly, especially as it comes into spring!
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Helping businesses with all aspects of their online presence
“Steven has gone over and above to deliver the most amazing website for me and I am absolutely thrilled with it. His patience through my numerous changes and his vision in getting it just right has been fantastic. I would highly recommend him to anyone looking for a new website and have already done so to colleagues and friends. Thank you Steven for everything!”
