The importance of website design for hotel businesses

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As travel plans start to take off, so do flights full of tourists to exotic destinations. But wherever they go, they will need a place to stay. When booking a hotel, people value things like room size, amenities, event preparation, pricing, booking, and so much more. With proper web design, hotels can make their services much more inviting.

Presenting Your Business Online – Everything You Need To Know

The reason why we are focusing on web design for hotels is simple. In the business of hospitality, having a web presence is more pivotal to success than ever. Pretty much everyone is making hotel reservations online in one way or another.

As such, the top players in this game have taken to the internet to market what they offer to consumers. As such, the best way to compete is to present yourself online in the most tempting way to potential guests.

1.   WordPress – The Gold Standard in Web Design

For the multitude of online businesses, WordPress is the premier web client for founding the perfect business site. In terms of web design for hotels, restaurants, e-stores, and other services, there are so many possibilities on this platform. It is a particular favorite for hospitality services for good reason.

Countless design options, a vast selection of themes, and many handy plugins like WooCommerce are just a few of what it brings to the table. Not only do you get the upper hand in front-end web design for hotel owners. Integrating booking and payment systems has never been more convenient and productive.

2.   Presentation is Key

As we have touched on already, a key part of presenting yourself online depends on how you exhibit yourself. For hotels, web design offers more than just a few handy tools for making a responsive website.

Visiting a hotel site for the first time should offer the exact same luxurious feeling as checking in to a real brick-and-mortar establishment. As they set foot on the premises, their attention focuses on the many modern features and state-of-the-art architecture.

The more you can wow them from the very beginning, the better your chances will be of being favored over your rivals. This very same concept applies to web services. The first thing they observe is how everything looks, and only then will they decide if they will ask for further details before their stay.

Straightforward Page Layout

Each landing page on your website must be simple yet informative and also easy to load. Ideally, the best thing to do is start with a home page and categorize based on services, user stories, booking interface, FAQs page, etc.

Your pages must be clearly composed with chic, contrasting fonts, tactically placed calls to action, menus and external links, and striking visual presentations (we’ll get to that last one in a moment).

Selecting Templates

In web design for hotels, the visual features that you choose as part of your branding depend on your service. As such, you need to make informed decisions about the theme, color combinations, and patterns you choose for your site backgrounds and interactive features.

Selecting the right theme alone drives up user responses by a significant margin. Whether you are running a B&B, beach resort, safari camp, or urban apartment complex, balancing creativity with tasteful design is critical.

High-end establishments do not usually go for flashy colors and should go for simple yet sleek color combinations with minimal hues and strategic uses of branding. If you are aiming for cozy, warmer shades of brown are the right way to go. Tropical getaways, however, can afford to play with more dazzling templates.

3.   Emphasize Visual Marketing

While we are on the subject of making a good impression, putting a spotlight on your services and facilities is a great way to use web design for hotels. Documenting the experiences of guests is an essential part of cost-effective remarketing.

Plus, if you have a lot going for you as a hotel, the internet provides the perfect avenue where you can set up a visual marketing campaign.

Quality Photography

If a hotel can reassure its guests about what is waiting for them once they have completed a reservation, they will be more likely to impress. Instead of using stock photos to give a rough idea of what you can offer, photographs of your property and features are a much more faithful and reliable option.

And more importantly, to establish yourself as a hotel that takes its job seriously, the best thing to do is to hire a professional photographer to present you in the best light. Web design for the hotel does not get easier than this.

Take as many pictures of every inch of your hotel, from the front entrance to the reception to every single hallway. Add photos of each room and suite to your website, along with other conveniences like water features, spas, lounges, and pools. Even small details like the mini-fridge in each room and its contents need to be photographed.

Promotional Videos

Video ads are the oldest marketing trick in the book, but they still work pretty well. Recording video tours of hotel lobbies, suites, and facilities are a great way for potential visitors to gain confidence that your service is indeed worth their while.

Plus, if your website supports the right platform, live streaming is very much on the table. This way, you can offer a real-time glimpse of what awaits at your hotel. With their curiosity restored, their willingness to know more about what you have to offer will be through the roof.

Broadcasts of everyday tours, staff introductions, and special events like birthdays, weddings, festivals, movie nights, and many more afford a breathtaking insight into the opulence of your establishment.

4.   Engage Viewers with Interactive Features

Effective web design for hotels should be engaging and dynamic. By investing in the ultimate user experience, it’s easier for others to realize that your company puts its customers first.

With WordPress, you can add any number of nifty features to your website that help keep visitors’ attention glued. Animations, customized menus, and a platter of booking and reservation options that can be modified at will.

Key interactive capabilities include two-way communication, website receptiveness, bespoke features, live social interaction, service demonstrability, and user control.

Some of the very best hotel websites offer search filters that enable users to search based on select criteria. Room size, choice of view, number of beds, and additional services like airport pickup, babysitting, room service, and many more can be included or excluded as necessary.

5.   State-of-the-Art Booking Systems

Receiving booking requests is one of the most demanding jobs that a hotel website must undertake. For that reason, implementing a functional booking mechanism is an area of much interest in web design for hotels.

For online bookings, these systems must appeal to visitors while also being easy to manage and administer from the back-end.

Luckily for WordPress sites, a large number of e-commerce plugins are designed specially to integrate sophisticated booking systems into hotel websites. Some of their features include

• Robust browser support
• Booking calendars
• Customizable features for selecting rooms
• Blocking requests outside business hours to prevent overbooking
• Adjusting fees based on the nature of accommodation, duration of visit, discounts, etc.
• Secure payment gateways
• Mobile friendly features

Booking software for hotels provides a one-stop solution for adding a maximum number of exciting and highly convenient features. This makes for a prime user experience and is a surefire way to get customers to join your hotel.

6.   Social Media Presence

While not necessarily a part of web design for hotels, linking social media accounts is a great way to improve your online presence as a business. More web audiences are using social media to look for and avail goods and services. With the level of reach available there, they offer a quick way for businesses to grow their brand.

For hotels, social media provides a range of opportunities like engaging with present guests, remarketing the experience of previous clients through stories and posts, promotional photography, live event streams, and public announcements via notifications.

Aside from standard commercial activities, sites like LinkedIn offer hotels a chance to boost their enterprise by partnering with other corporate bodies and high-ranking personnel.

7.   Mobile-First Design

In recent years, mobile phones have emerged as the gadget of choice for the majority of online activities and content consumption. For quick hotel bookings, people are more likely to use their phones rather than laptops or tablets.

With that in mind, effective web design for hotels is incomplete without optimizing web pages for mobile devices. But that doesn’t just mean making websites responsive, as that hardly promises that their key features and content will display as well on smaller screens.

Hotels and all other businesses must employ mobile-first web design as that is easier for Desktop to display than the other way around.

Additionally, since mobiles have less power and bandwidth, websites must be designed with lightweight yet user-friendly features that ensure that the site loads without fail. Slow websites are bad for business and lead to poor SEO rankings.

8.   Maintenance Is Crucial

In web design, for hotels and all other reservation-based services, creating a website is just the first set. Website maintenance is a crucial follow-up step needed to maintain your website’s health in the long run.

• There are several aspects of web maintenance, including
• Maintaining device and browser compatibility following updates
• Monitoring site analytics and worldwide accessibility
• Renewing or deleting old links
• Dealing with HTML errors
• Making sure plugins are working correctly
• Improving site speed

Website maintenance is particularly essential for two reasons. Firstly, it helps make sure that your website is less vulnerable to hacking or malware attacks through server updates and revamped security settings. Secondly, it helps your website impress Google’s crawlers and rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Depending on what needs to be checked, maintenance checks can be grouped into weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly checks. The larger the issue gets, the more time you must wait before checking. Smaller tasks must be seen more frequently as they add up fast and can get out of control if ignored for long.

9.   Test Your Website

This can be regarded as a part of web maintenance. Once you’ve created an interactive hotel website full of features and content, you need to make sure that it is doing what it’s supposed to.

Double checking website functionality is a standard practice in web design for hotels, online stores, and delivery services, to name a few. Through it, you can monitor your website’s health and performance while staying one step ahead of any compatibility or technical issues.

This is also important in the case of mobile-optimized websites, as that is where most of the traffic lies. Here you must make sure that your site’s features, display, and loading capabilities are not compromised.

Hire a Professional for Your Web Design Needs

Web design for hotels is a complex field where dedication equals results. But while it’s an important undertaking, hoteliers don’t necessarily have the skills to master it fast enough. Even if they do, most of them have more hands-on responsibilities on their plate.

Website development and optimization for e-commerce needs is a game of experience, knowledge, and expertise. For that reason, digital firms and agencies hire seasoned professionals with years of technical know-how in curating online pages for corporate applications.

Services like WeLoveWeb are the backbone of e-commerce solutions and are well-known among small, medium, and large businesses for providing digital marketing and web design solutions for internet-based endeavors and projects. Hotel owners can enjoy these services as well in affordable, cost-effective packages guaranteed to help their image.

Good Luck

As markets everywhere are moving to the digital realm for profits, the significance of well-tailored, engaging, and user-oriented web design for hotel businesses is impossible to overestimate. And most major hotel chains know that, which is why they too have taken their business online.

By operating online and prioritizing phone users, hotels are able to appeal to much greater audiences. To aid their campaigns, they are provided with an endless array of digital platforms, content packages, promotional schemes, and handy software.

But the core appeal of having an online presence is to accommodate its guests. If there is one area that hotels have always specialized in, it’s hospitality. Caring for customers to the best of their extent is part of this whole business, so why not continue this tradition online?

With everything we’ve discussed, meaningful web design is a surefire way for hotels to satisfy guests and improve their business prospects in doing so. It’s a win-win for everyone.