Awards:
'Outstanding Achievement'
codegent is a full service web development new media agency, based in clapham, london, uk, that delivers well-designed content managed sites, microsites and flash games supported by robust technology and integrated marketing solutions including search engine optimisation, pay-per-click and html email.
One of the country's top entrepreneurs approached us to create a site to do justice to his multi award-winning hotel.
The hotel is celebrated for it's open pricing structure, value for money and the consistent over delivery that they provide their clients with.
We were tasked with portraying the beauty of the hotel surroundings through an immersive, visual experience whilst mainitaining the strong natural search rankings that the hotel had built up over several years of SEO investment.
Ultimately, we wanted the experience of using their website to convey the feeling of walking into the lobby of this beautiful place and for our work to support the hotel's mission statement of 'Luxury where it matters, Budget where it counts'.
Lurking behind the artistic aims of the site was the commercial need of converting visitors to paying customers.
We broke down the hotels offering into the 4 core reasons that people visit; Sleeping, Eating, Meeting and Exploring.
For each we commissioned a lifestyle photographer to capture the essence of the experience and brought it to life through subtly animated Flash. The animation draws users attention in from the beauty of the wider image to the intricate details of the scene, which in turn portray the twin elements of value and luxury. The result is an immersive web experience, full of the character and soul that wins the hotel it's numerous awards.
Remaining highly optimised for search was critical to the success of the site for a hotel who receive a significant percentage of their traffic from search engines. A significant technical consideration was balancing this need with the animation possibilities but limited optimisation capabilities of Flash.
Our solution was to break down the Flash components of the site into separate files housed within html, each with their own indexable url and no-flash versions to maintain optimisation.
Ubiquitous links to the hotel's 3rd party booking system and clear calls to action mean that visitors have a clear conversion route without the hard sell.
Since go-live the hotel's month-by-month web bookings are already up over 35%. Pages per visit are up from 4 to 17 and time consuming, information-seeking phonecalls are significantly down.
The hotel has retained it's impressive natural search position for it's key search terms, despite the move to a predominantly visual site and a multi-platform rollout is being planned based on the success of the flagship website.
