Plan B By The Sea - Three coastal hotel sites go live.

That was some week!

It's been an incredibly fast paced start to the New Year with website after website and project after project reaching fruition but the past week has been especially busy with no fewer than four sites going live and major upgrades to our server and content management system rolling out at the same time!

We thought we should share some of the background to them with you

Waterside Hotel, Ayrshire

I was at a Team North Ayrshire conference last Friday at this wonderful venue just south of Seamill and the investment put into it by the Simpsinns family business is impressive. The event hosted the Depute First Minister who really was fighting with the magnificent views across the Firth of Clyde towards Arran, The backdrop of blue skies and flat calm seas combined to make the economic presentations just a little easier to understand!

However it did emphasise that the work that we had done on the new hotel, restaurant and venue site really did benefit from the quality of the location and the professional photography taken of it. The new Waterside site was rolled out about six months ago but with some changes to photography and some work on the group branding we wanted to make some positive changes.

The new site still benefits from full screen imagery on the home page with multiple feature boxes highlighting key events and calls to action with image galleries across all pages. A new footer was added (which will be adopted in the sister sites at Gailes Resort and Old Loans Inn over the coming weeks) and the integration of a bespoke coded availability checker as well as some subtle changes to the navigation bar. In addition the site is now benefiting from major changes to the security and upload of our servers with Content Delivery Networks improving global delivery and a number of new functions improving the speed of the page load dramatically for desktop and mobile.

Everything is content managed from our proprietary Claymore system and changing images, titles, tags, content and promotions has never been easier.

The site is one of our new Open Rooms Suite packages with a single set up fee and then recurring monthly charges of £120 plus VAT per month - it's contract free and benefits include a redesign included at the end of year two.

Royal Golf Hotel, Dornoch

There is a coastal them to all of our new hotel sites this week with each one of them sitting on a different Scottish sea! The Royal Golf Hotel benefits from magnificent location close to the wonderful stretch of Dornoch Beach and views across the Dornoch Firth - as well as sitting right on the first tee of the famous Royal Dornoch golf course.

We have been working with the Royal Golf on delivering digital solutions for close on a decade and in that time have helped not only with their website but in providing their booking engine (Bookassist), content writing, email marketing and strong account management.

We have built up a very strong relationship with their management team, so when we got the go ahead to rebuild the site we went full steam ahead turning it around from get go to go live in less than ten days.

Using one of our "Themes" (or "Website Views depending on what day it is!) the site was again built using our Open Rooms Suite package and includes Bookasssit as the booking engine, integrates ConstantContact for the email marketing and data collection and features a new image gallery layout. We helped with content edits and search tags and uploading images - although all of these tasks are now being handled by the team at the hotel directly.

We think the new site not only markets the hotel more effectively across all devices but undoubtedly promotes the attractions of the destination too.

The Crusoe Hotel, Fife

The final coastal destination of our business week is another quite unique property and the one quite clearly closest to the water's edge!

The Crusoe Hotel is located right on the harbour and as can be seen above seems to sit in rather than next to the sea! Lower Largo is famous as the seventeenth century birthplace of Alexander Selkirk who provided the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and today you can locate the signpost pointing to Juan Fernández Islands 7,500 miles away where Selkirk lived for more than four years as a castaway!

Anyway, back to this unique family run hotel and the new website. Another Open Rooms Suite package built to convert direct room sales.

The hotel attracts many golfers due to its proximity not only to St Andrews but the coastal links of Lundin, Crail, Kingsbarns and others and indeed the hotel won small golf hotel of the year in the 2015 Golf Scotland Tourism awards,

The site is built using one of our themes but as ever is highly personalised with a really nice "olde worlde" cartography background and wood carving style for the maps. The site makes great use of our content managed features highlighting exclusive offers and linking directly into the Bookassist booking engine which is fully integrated into the site.

So that was part of our week this week. Three hotel sites live plus another one for Kilmarnock Barassie Golf Club and ongoing work on a few more. 

If your hospitality business is in need of a digital refresh drop us a note and we'll give you a call. Contact us on 01294 233713 or email us directly.