How to turn your hotel website into a beautiful storefront for customers

There are many factors which contribute to a high-converting hotel website, perhaps none more so than a beautiful aesthetic. A beautiful, visually appealing hotel website design could prove the difference between a traveller coming in to explore or remaining at your doorstep and moving on.

Hoteliers are certainly multi-skilled, but website design may not be your strong suit. This doesn’t mean you can’t create a website that will delight visitors. Often it’s just a matter of knowing exactly what steps you need to take and how to execute them.

Luckily, these tips can set you off on the right foot to keep your hotel booking website beautiful and produce direct bookings.

Treat your hotel website like a shop window

A lot of the time, your website may be the first interaction a potential guest has with your property. This means your first impression has to be a good one, and entice the visitor inside.

When your website first loads you have to capture the attention of the traveller, preferably with prominent high-quality images and/or attractive offers. In other words, put your best foot forward and get them in the door before you really start to sell to them. If they feel good about your website when they initially land on it, they’ll be much more likely to take the rest of it seriously.

For example, you might use a scrolling slideshow to catch attention or a large panoramic view to create awe and excitement, with a colour palette that suits your hotel’s brand.

Keep it consistent

Just like a good book or film, there can’t be too many tonal shifts within your website. Using too many different colours, font sizes, banners, offers etc. could be jarring for a user as they navigate through the website. Every page needs to be presented in a similar manner, with photos and images being of a uniform high quality, clean text properly checked for spelling and grammar, and a consistent style and tone across each page.

Always remember to update your content regularly to prevent it from seeming tired or stale. For instance, you might update images and videos to reflect different seasons or current travel trends.

Use professional images

First and foremost the images you use throughout your hotel website need to be of the highest resolution and quality of composition you can manage, without excessively slowing your load time. Here are some tips:

• Capture a pleasing vista

Think about showing bedrooms with window views, a pleasant view, and natural light. This will help create an instant reaction between the guest and your hotel. Positive feelings can be evoked by capturing something interesting outside of the hotel like a beach, city, or landmark.

• Display unique and attractive features

If your hotel has any unique features put them front and centre in your photography to delight the eyes of online shoppers.

• Don’t meddle with perspective, balance, and distortion

It’s important that your images look authentic. Photos that look skewed or altered can arouse suspicion in your guests because they create unrealistic representations of your property.

• Use images that are clean and crisp

Neatness and precision, along with light and space are the most likely aspects to create a pleasant reaction from a web browser. Avoid messiness and clutter, clashing colours, odd angles, or missing features such as bathroom or wardrobe.

• Keep your target market in mind

If you are a hotel that generally attracts young millennials and solo travellers then make sure these demographics are represented in your imagery, so they can visualise themselves at your property.

Give travellers the opportunity to make quick purchases

For anyone looking to book with your hotel, especially impulse shoppers, it’s critical they have easy access to your online booking engine through your website.

This should present in the form of a ‘book now’ button, prominently and attractively displayed on your homepage and on any other landing pages you deem relevant.

To save time and money curating your website you could invest in a website building tool designed specifically for hotels. A hotel website building tool will allow you to easily design and maintain your website, as well as integrate with your booking engine.