Hotel and Restaurant Website Design

SEO website design for The Wychwood Inn – a hotel, bar and restaurant based in the Cotswolds. We wrote the content, planned the structure, and then designed and programmed the hotel website using SCSS, HTML5 and PHP. The intention was to keep the site fast-loading to improve its organic search engine optimisation.

Design of the Hotel Website

As requested, we used the corporate colours of brown and lime-green throughout the site. The lime green call-to-action buttons draw the eye, leading the user to journey to the next part of the site.

The Wychwood Inn has great professional photographs that we used as large buttons within the top menu, adding a bit of design interest.

There is movement in the navigation area on a desktop computer as the visitor scrolls the website. The mobile menu ‘collapses’ because the desktop version would take up too much room on a small screen.

On a mobile screen, the collapsing menu conceals menu items behind an icon known as the burger menu – the three horizontal bars. The burger menu is an orderly way to enable the visitor to find information quickly.

It’s essential to label the mobile navigation clearly and keep it obvious, so the visitor instantly knows where to look for further information.

Images and Media

Understandably, The Wychwood Inn wanted to use big images for visual effect, but I’ve kept the website as fast as possible.

We used a parallax image on the home page of the desktop; a parallax is an image that stays still whilst the page scrolls.

The parallax was positioned further down the page for three reasons:

The search engine bots will easily find the written content.
It’s a better experience for users.
Loading a large image further down the page helps with the core web vital metric – LCP (largest contentful paint).

These are preferred tactics when developing a website for better search engine rank.

We created a grid gallery on the ROOM pages to show the lovely photos of the bedrooms. Again, we needed to use higher resolution images to look good on the page, so we used an image loader which speeds up the process.

The images open a larger version in a lightbox; a lightbox displays images by filling the screen and dimming the rest of the web page.

There is a Google virtual tour on each of the pages for the rooms.

Written Content for SEO

The website build was ultimately led by the selected keywords we had researched. We wrote the pages around popular long-tail key phrases to help the website rank well and appear in front of its target audience.

The AREA page is an informative hub around Shipton-under-Wychwood (the village) – on it, we were generous with external links to help with search engine optimisation. The page ranks above TripAdvisor and Visit South East England.

Writing ‘THE BAR’ page was enjoyable – conjuring up the image of this historic building to a would-be visitor.

There are tons of informative pages on the site, written around terms that are regularly searched online. The pages easily inform people what is on hand at The Wychwood Inn, creating a great user experience.

thewychwoodinn.com

Search Engine Optimisation for a Hotel/Restaurant

Once the search engine campaign finished, we continued to track the website and could see it steadily climbing. It was exciting to see it ranked well for key phrases we had researched.

The progressive rise in rank took nearly a year, but our founder, Kelly, was pleased to see the website beating all its competitors once Google had realised the website’s potential.

Good rank is no easy feat for a hotel and restaurant in the middle of a popular tourist destination – the Cotswolds, UK.

Visitors to the website have almost doubled since we started the SEO campaign.