Does web design for your hotel give you an “uh-oh” feeling in your stomach?
NB: This is an article from WebRezPro
Do you have a great property, but you aren’t sure how to market it online? You’ve come to the right place. We lay out key strategies of hotel website design to make sure your guests hit that “book now” button.
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Responsive Design/Mobile First
Your guests are busy. They don’t always have time to sit down at the computer to make their booking. They rely on mobile devices, which means your website has to look nice–and make sense–on those devices too.
Do this with a responsive website design that adapts to the device accessing it, ensuring your website looks and works great on all screen sizes.
We recommend a mobile-first mindset, which means you design your website for mobile, then add features for the computer version. This keeps you focused on what’s important for a snappier, user-friendly experience. Pare up rather than pare down. If you pare down, you could end up with a website that has lots of cool features on desktop but that may not work well on a mobile.
Guests don’t need a fancy website. They need a website they can understand and use quickly.
Branding
Your website should tell a story. Not just your story–your guest’s story too. You want your guest to imagine their experience staying at your hotel. Take your guest on a journey that ends in booking.
Your website colors tie that journey together. A minimalist color palette that complements rather than distracts is best. Keep colors consistent; this creates trustworthiness and eliminates confusion around your brand. In our redesign for Forest Home Cabins, we used plenty of white space and light gray to allow the green in the photography to shine. The rusty red accent color used for the call-to-action buttons contrasts with the green imagery to make those buttons stand out, while maintaining a harmonious color combination that is as calming as a stay in the woods.
Your language, too, should reflect your hotel’s personality to give guests a taste of what they’ll get if they stay. If you’re a minimalist hotel, don’t use run-on sentences. Don’t use run-on sentences either way.
Include calls to action that lead guests along their journey. Your website won’t work if guests don’t know what you want them to do.
Speaking of calls to action, your online booking engine should also reflect your branding to match your website for a seamless experience that your guests trust.
Online Booking Engine
Make sure your online booking engine (OBE) is available from every page of your website, ready the moment a guest decides to book! Include a “book now” button in the header or main menu. You can also add your OBE via a booking widget, availability calendar, or unit/rate-specific booking links. Read our web design article about how to add an online booking engine to your website for more information.
