Wakefield Mill – Website
Created at Kaboom communication design in 2016 with WordPress
A well-known touristic gem in the National Capital region, Wakefield Mill is a luxury inn that hosts a gourmet restaurant, a spa and a number of meeting rooms in a scenic environment.
Their site being outdated, the Mill’s management wanted to get their hands on a more appealing online sales tool that would better reflect their settings and location. The first order of business would be to promote packages to raise occupancy on week days.
My Role for this Project
- Content strategy
- UX design
- Development planning and management
The Results
- More time spent by each visitor on average on packages
- More visits coming from organic search results and direct access
- More time spent on average on any page of the website
Content Strategy
The Mill’s desire to promote packages more aggressively would mean changing their site’s content structure, completely separating packages from pages, in order to be able to display them both in listings and in other specific areas of the website. Packages would remain grouped in categories (business, spa and lodging, the latter also having seasonal or thematic sub-categories) to make searching through them easy for better client conversion.
Although it never came to fruition, an online store was to replace an embedded external system, which presented users with an arduous buying experience. Packages would therefore have to double as products to be bought on the site.
A blog, which already existed and had its own, separate CMS, was also going to be integrated to the main website, to make content management simpler and to focus all attention on the Mill’s main domain name (wakefieldmill.com) instead of sharing it with a subdomain.
UX Design
Reorganizing the site’s information, both in terms of architecture and visual layout, would make the overall user experience more appealing and convincing, allowing the public to quickly find targeted content. A brand new user interface, showcasing large pictures of the Mill and its surroundings, would play a major role in making this experience better by setting a more accurate mood. The addition of a few select functionalities would also contribute to the project.
The online booking area was repositioned to integrate seamlessly within the new interface, without losing its impact or user-friendliness. Adding calls-to-action for phone reservations and direct linking to the online booking engine in the sidebar was meant to increase the rate of visitors who would go and book on their very first visit on the website.
As one of the main goals of the project was to sell more packages, adding popular packages at the bottom of most pages, recommended packages in the sidebar and links to different areas of the site (promoting the restaurant in business-related pages, or showcasing the spa in lodging-related pages, for example) would entice visitors to browse for longer periods, increasing the chances they would eventually be converted to actual clients, either in their current visit to the site or any subsequent one.
Lastly, the Mill’s gourmet restaurant being an attraction all by itself, as well as providing an opportunity to promote some of the other features to prospective clients, its menu had to be easier to view online and booking a table would have to prove a more seamless experience.
Development Planning and Management
- Development of the structure of content types
- Planning of interactions (user-interface and content-type-to-content-type relations)
- Planning of functionalities
- Supervision of development (identification of tasks, identification of milestones and quality control)