We worked closely with Kate and Ed on initial designs for a bespoke, visually enticing website that would appeal to the elite demographic they were targeting. This included creating several designed page templates, rather than one standard layout, which added depth and consideration to the final appearance.

As Kate has a creative background, it was important that she had the opportunity to collaborate closely with our designers. In this way, we were able to discuss and refine the use of the brand colour palette (bringing it more in line with the luxury ethos) as well as layouts, spacing and other design elements, ensuring the page templates were curated to the highest level in reflection of the brand.

The site’s initial focus was holidays within West Sussex, showcasing what the area has to offer through extensive imagery, video, and other “value added” content such as local recommendations, area guides and partner suppliers. It was important that the user experience offered simple ways to navigate around these additional content areas, and so we looked at solutions such as the use of icons, maps, illustration, cross-sells, and sticky navigation, to help simply guide users to relevant content. To give the blog section more importance, we took the opportunity to make it visually different, while adding movement with the use of parallax.

For such beautiful homes, imagery was another key focus. We gave property images more prominence by removing the standard slideshow and replacing it with a hero image and thumbnail images. This provides the user with a quick overview and the option to launch a full-screen lightbox gallery for a better viewing experience. A grid layout for featured properties also made it possible for users to see more properties at once.

With ease of booking in mind, we suggested a homepage with a single image or short looping video to remove any distractions from the booking widget. We also placed this booking widget prominently near the top of the page, allowing it to overlap the imagery or video to give more prominence to this core user objective.

While design and visual identity create impact, the site’s persuasive power wouldn’t be complete without compelling copy to narrate the Luxury Boltholes story. We wrote original, on-brand copy for the site’s key pages, communicating the difference in the Luxury Boltholes offering. By doing this in-house, we were able to liaise regularly across copy and design, to ensure that text complemented the layout of each page.

With new properties and content being added as the business expands, the Luxury Boltholes team wanted as much autonomy over their site as possible. This meant that it needed to be easy to update, with the ability to build pages and edit content in-house on an ongoing basis.

For this reason, Craft was an ideal choice of content management system (CMS) – the user-friendly interface makes it easy to effect changes, add content, and even build entirely new pages from designed components. The result is a bespoke site that’s robustly positioned for the future; able to grow in harmony with the overarching Luxury Boltholes offering.