Usually when a client comes to us asking us to develop a website, they already have some idea of how they want it to look. They might already have a chosen colour scheme, a logo, or even a full-size branding guide. We take these ideas and work with the client to produce a design they are happy with. South Wales Hotels however was different. In this case, we are not just the designers and developers, but we're also the client. When putting together the site, we literally started with just a blank sheet of paper.
Our first task was to look at similar sites that already exist - such as Laterooms and Hotels.co.uk - and ask ourselves some questions: What would we have done differently? How could we improve that? Why have they done that? etc. Once this part was complete, we had a good idea of what we wanted to do.
The immediate reaction is to open Photoshop (or other graphics package) and start putting together a design. However, this can waste time and effort, coming up with colour schemes, gradients, rounded corners, etc. none of which are as important as getting the structure together and making sure it feels right. The polish can easily be added later. Instead, I sat down with a pen and paper, and started to sketch out layouts for each type of page.
Below I've scanned in a few of my sketches to show you some of the thought that went into the final design.
Searching for hotels
One of the primary aims of the site was to make it quick and easy to find hotels in a particular part of South wales. We tried to approach this in several ways. The first is our 'Locations' menu that provides quick links to the 5 major areas we cover - Cardiff, Swansea, Newport, Brecon and Haverfordwest. We'll be keeping these items under constant review and if we think somewhere else deserves to be up there instead, we'll change them. Most other locations that aren't listed in those top 5 can be found in our sitemap at the bottom of each page.
Another way we've attempted to achieve our primary aim is through our 'Hotel Search' bar that is available on every page of the site. From here you can select a location, whether it be Abergavenny, Cardiff Bay or Lampeter, choose the distance you want and star rating. Our search system will then return all the hotels matching your request.
Where are the hotels?
It's all very well knowing that your hotel is 5 minutes away from Swansea city centre, but where exactly is it? We've tried to overcome this by pinpointing the hotel on a map. If you are searching for a hotel, you can see all the results on the map, highlighted by an icon showing their star rating. If you want to know where a particular hotel is, it's information page has a map and links to directions from Google, Multimap and Windows Live Maps.
South Wales is a busy place
There are lots of events taking place in South Wales, from food festivals, to racing at Chepstow, from the Kiev Classical Ballet in Cardiff's St David's Hall, to the Ryder Cup at the Celtic Manor in 2010. One of the things we wanted to do was promote these events and make it easy to find somewhere to stay so that you can enjoy all South Wales has to offer. For this reason we've created pages that provide a list of hotels near to each event. In the future, we'll be adding more events around South Wales, with modules on individual location pages to point out events happening near-buy.
Work in progress
South Wales Hotels is still very much a work in progress, we're making changes all the time, looking at how to improve performance and usability. If you have any ideas, feel free to let us know.