About 85 percent of the hospitality websites you can surf to right now need a redesign. Don’t try and find the math to justify my exactness here, just user your “mind’s eye” to scroll back through what you’ve surfed to, and past, during your web experience. Luckily the old saying “ugly is forever” does not have to apply for your business billboard on the web.
Below you’ll find exhibited some cutting edge designs from slick and super fast, to elegant and all encompassing. Please do, also let us know some of your favorites travelling the web. The website screen shot above is actually what your site should look like on somebody’s screen soon. Really.
Lewis Media Group
From the red hot classy and passionate Augustus Collection luxury fashion – slash marketing – slash event planners – and lots more (see our original article here), to Todd Reed’s enticingly simplistic persona hotels (below), logo to login – Chicago’s Lewis Media Group makes some killer websites. The company offers website design, web development, and local SEO services, among others.
Mediasoul.it
Many reading this will never have heard of this company. Then again, not so many know of Patek Philippe watches either. Well, there’s not much of a Timex built into the designs created by Mediasoul, except their efforts keep on ticking. One look at Capo La Gala Hotel in Italy, for instance, will render quickly an idea of design exquisiteness. And, not to be left lacking where their own home pages reside, the team of artists in every field at this award winning agency have pretty much done it all. Sound editing to coding, design and marketing, there is no comparative out there. Branding to mixing the best possible soundtrack for your digital effort, this is the agency I would want to afford.
To illustrate for my part, a website with auto sound is generally a horrendous traffic “bounce” disaster. Then again, your website without sound is two dimensional. So, the balance is there, as it is offline. Visit the Villa Verde Capri Restaurant for visuals mixed with JUST the right sound.
Toky
What if you needed the whole shebang? If you could afford to, if your business demanded the very best, would you consider everything from stationary to the little mints on the pillow – ad campaigns and digital creations, or as Toky puts it:
Design. Content. Insights. Smart Work for Smart Brands
If you could, would, then the image below from Toky’s collaboration with the Opera Theater of St. Louis would be a piece of your digital and downtown success story. The 27 member team at this digital communications and creative firm, they have won just about everything in their 15 years. Complex web design to extending your brand, you could do no harm hiring these people. You can tweet them @tokybd
Ultranoir
Someone is whispering; “Where is Silicon Valley in all this?” Silicon Valley is mired all up in Google’s…. Well, we are speaking of refined design and branding excellence here, sorry. The French are really good a making pastries, cheese, wine, and as it turns out, digital stuff too. As you can see, hear, and feel from the Roger Dubuis website below (visit please), fine stuff just demands fine stuff like the multi-award winning team at Ultranoir.
WIHP
Vincent Ramelli’s team, they are just excellent. We have actually had occasion to work with the marketing team. Here’s the thing on this website design and branding crew, when thinking of finding the absolute best there is out there, I simply could not conjure up a more deserving bunch than our friends in Paris. Call me prejudiced, call me partial, just call me for dinner no matter what. WIHP’s Convert websites are the quickest and most economical web solutions any hotel can adopt.
And no one has proven otherwise, to my knowledge. Massive image intensive, minimalist and rapid to deploy, my original evaluation of this platform is still valid. Add to this award winning marketing and conversions – WIHP spells Win in my book, and I have no qualms about suggesting readers check them out.
Take Away
Your hotel or restaurant is in business to make money. Your competitors out there, the bistro down the street serves the same pastrami sandwich you do, more or less. Even if you pastrami is more fresh than theirs, your waitress sexier, the leather on your booths brand new – if your website or mobile app sucks and their’s does not, where do you think the most customers will be seated taking brunch or dinner?
Being complacent in the digital age is no longer a luxury your business can afford – and in two years, five? If you’re not out of business by the latter, you will be shortly thereafter. If you manage to hang on even til then, email me and I will publicly admit your business model’s superiority.
Find a designer, some help with channel management, and get busy converting to digital.