PORTFOLIO
A-Haven Townhouse
With fourteen pleasant rooms on offer and a warm, friendly service, the only thing that didn’t put a smile on guests faces was the old website.
THE CHALLENGE
Create a site that better reflects the guesthouse.
It’s more than fair to say that the old A-Haven Guesthouse website acted as a deterrent to potential guests, rather than a useful tool for booking a stay.
The original site was designed and built in the early 2000’s, and every pixel showed that fact. It was slow and unresponsive, while also falling flat in terms of aesthetics. Given that the owners had recently refurbished the rooms and taken the guesthouse in a different direction, the site failed to reflect that.
The site was riddled with broken links throughout, with many pages refusing to open in modern browsers for being considered unsafe. There was no SSL certificate to protect guests, and each page opened in a new tab, leading to a frustrating user experience.
If you wanted to use the site on a mobile or tablet, it just wasn’t possible. In truth, it was also a challenge to use on a desktop.
THE RESULT
A modern site that’s as fresh as it is usable.
One of the first major overhauls came from the site map itself, including the structure of the pages and the information architecture. The old site was random and had no real flow to speak of, so I spoke with real users and created a cleaner, more simple navigation with their input, taking the user on a logical journey.
I also designed it from a mobile-first perspective, ensuring that it would function seamlessly, regardless of device or browser. This enabled increased accessibility for users on the go – a common theme we found during our user interviews.
The old site lacked any real emotive photography when it came to the rooms, so we fixed that, creating a layout that leans on the use of imagery. This was identified as one of the key features users wanted to see before making a booking.
Finally, I redesigned their old logo, in order to make it more fresh and browser-friendly.
The result has been an annual booking increase of 34% directly from the site.
