Church Street Inn
Set in the center of a historic French Colonial town in Louisiana, Ken and Jan Starks transformed an old bank building into a hotel. This family operated hotel thrives on referrals and the web site to attract guests, so it was important that the site convey the experience of their guests. In addition, the site needed to compliment the hospitality and the architecture of the hotel and its surroundings – the primary attraction for visitors.
I borrowed colors and patterns found in the hotel to create a design scheme that is iconic for the local area. I took a risk in using cursive fonts in the menu, using the same font type found in the logo – the large font size and tooltips maintain readability. Integrating guest comments into the page design was a key strategy to express the guest experience.
Information Architecture, Information Design, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Coding
There is no substitute for personal experience, so infusing customer comments into the page design made the site more personal and best reflected the experience of guests. The web site lends credibility to personal referrals and contributes to the above average occupancy achieved by this hotel.
I intentionally designed this site for search engine optimization in order to achieve and maintain high search result ranking. My knowledge of how a customer searches for hotels along with my SEO and content strategy experience enabled this web site to rank in the Top 1 & 2 search results, achieving a critical win over similar named hotels that have placements with the top online travel agencies.
