Website Design Tips for Hotels, Restaurants & Bars

by Sam Trainor-Buckingham published 23rd Jan 2012

Welcome to Ignite's Tips Of The Week!

Every Monday for 2012 our team will provide interesting tips on different subjects relating to hospitality.

Each member of our team contributes one point, so you'll find the tips are wide-ranging, easy to digest and hopefully thought provoking.

This week: web design for hotels, restaurants & bars. Our answers are collated below, with some great nuggets of information..

Pose questions in the comment box below and the team will provide their answers next Monday.

Website Design Tips:

Identify your core user groups and design for them. Ask yourself the question - "can my core user groups find what they're looking for quickly and easily?" Users are often 'task focused' so ensure they can complete their task.
The navigation on a website is extremely important - and is the primary way users navigate a site. Don't overcrowd it with every option that's important to YOU, keep it clean, simple & high in impact. Users will digest, click and find what they want if there is less to select from.
Include very clear conversion actions and ensure they are consistent, every business website should achieve business and marketing objectives.
Be clever with your Calls To Action, usability studies we've run indicate users are more likely to click on 'Book Here' than 'Book Now' on hotel websites as it's less sales orientated.
Keep text to a minimum, no-one reads it aside from the owners of the business. Though use some for SEO purposes.
"A picture is worth a thousand words" - high quality photography will transform your site, persuading people that your hotel, restaurant or bar is a great place with a fantastic product.
In our experience high quality photography consistently leads to higher page views and shares on social media.
Keep it functional. A cool animation or complex design piece soon seems hopeless/pointless if it's not there for a reason.
Keep design appropriate, copy striking and clear to ensure visitors know exactly what the business does and what its USPs are.
Get your web developer to start looking into media queries - these are only going be more relevant as more people view the web through handheld devices.
Optimise your site for different devices. A high image site might look great on a desktop and not function at all on a desktop computer.
Responsive Design is a great solution, as it allows the design to respond to the device it's viewed on, ensuring your site is optimised.
With all the buzz about Responsive Web Design and how it's techniques are used to display your site on all varying sizes of devices it is good to remember that the mobile site we have grown accustomed to over the past few years is not to be forgotten.
While the responsive approach is practical in most cases don't forget that content heavy sites or streamed content sites (using social media feeds or video) can benefit from a design that is based on the mobile app design and functionality we have now become familiar with.
This can be very vital to your mobile audience whose primary environment will be 'on-the-go'.
Use a grid! To put it simply, a grid is a layout of columns and rows in which to overlay design elements to help align different parts of the composition. In web design the grid is an aid, not a restriction, and is there to help you create interesting visual relationships between elements. It may sound mundane but it's a vital part of producing a design with a strong structure.
However, don't be afraid to break the grid - it's there to create a basic layout and a more fluid design can be created by having certain elements break free from their specified area within the grid.
Carry a notebook and camera everywhere you go. Collect information and record everything, this will lead to inspired design - web or otherwise.

Pose questions in the comment box below and the team will provide their answers next Monday.

Author : Sam Trainor-Buckingham

Sam is the Marketing Director at Ignite Hospitality Consultants, he loves branding, developing strategies and coming up with creative marketing campaigns.
View Sam's team page...

Tags : Online