Brief
Following our original brief to define the brand strategy, positioning and identity for the rebirth of The Potlatch Club, we were commissioned to create a world-class website to bring this beautiful luxury resort to life, in a world of look-a-like luxury hotel websites.
Solution
We recommended a bespoke website design, where we could identify all the hotel's unique requirements and then design every element to bring The Potlatch Club’s brand proposition to life online.
We started with the information architecture (IA) and user experience (UX) design, using our deep luxury hotel industry experience to map-out an intuitive-to-use and easy-to-manage website architecture.
We identified the technical requirements and selected Umbraco Cloud as the content management system around which we could build the website application, integrating with MailChimp for subscribers and e-marketing, SynXis for online bookings and JotForms for secure form management.
We then designed the user interface, using the brand system we had already created to great effect offline, combining the Questa Grande and distinctive Braisetto fonts with progressive loading, along with fade-ins and parallax scrolling to create an animated, but precisely calibrated, user experience, while avoiding overplaying the graphic motion. With luxury brands, less is almost always more. As hotel branding is all about imagery, we included specially galleries that provide space to present landscape, square and portrait images to their best effect.
Photography is key in bringing a hotel to life online, so we required a photographer whose sensitive eye could make the most of the lush tropical setting and stunning beach, but also capture the interiors and the food. We recommended David Loftus, who we have worked with many times before and whose late identical twin brother, John, was one of our star young designers in the late1980’s. We also commissioned David to create a series of illustrations to use as backgrounds, along with a hand-drawn resort map.
Art directed by Peter Matthews, David shot in natural light, using drones and video as well as hand-held stills, shooting thousands of images and clips over two trips in November 2023 and June 2024. The result delivers a rare visual integrity through the continuity of a single lens on the Potlatch world.
Meanwhile our development team created the HTML, carefully tuning all the animated elements before integrating with the CMS components to deliver a beautifully crafted bespoke website, combined with the practicality of a best-of-breed CMS for easy content management.
We then wrote all the website copy in order to maintain the brand tone of voice, delivering the entire website as an end-to-end programme, including SEO and webmastering support.
Further assistance included strategic marketing advice to the owners, including the selection of PR and sales and marketing representation through Alice Marshall PR in New York and Lucy Clifton at Spotlight in London.
Results
The Potlatch Club fully opened in June 2024 creating a buzz locally and across the world with features in The Financial Times' Travelista column as 'one of 5 new hotels in the world with now factor', Conde Naste Traveler, Luxury Explorer, the Caribbean Journal, TIME magazine, Travel + Leisure. and Vogue.
The new website replaced a successful teaser site that had seen traffic peak at 490 a day with dwell times for a single page at over a minute. On the first day after the launch of the full website, these dwell times more than doubled and traffic reached a new peak of 599 visitors in a day, one week after launch.
On October 2 2024, The Potatch Club website won Silver in the W3 Awards in New York for its outstanding user experience, creativity, excelent content and good use of technology. Later in October this was followed by another New York award, winning Silver at the Daveys.
Locally, The Potlatch Club is already considered to be the finest hotel on the island of Eleuthera, with the top restaurant; and now the very best website!
For more information about our bespoke website design and build services, please get in touch by email or phone.