The Challenge
Lonely Oak Event Hire Ltd. were seeking a website for their brand new holiday venture, Pear Tree Cottage. This stunning little Shepherds Hut is situated on the Eland Lodge estate, and was specially set up to cater for people bringing their horses and dogs on holiday. The challenge: to design a website that encapsulates the peace, tranquility and beauty of the surrounding countryside, promotes the top-class equestrian facilities available, whilst offering the user a easy-to-use booking system.
The Process
Location Location Location
Nothing is more annoying than when you think you’ve found the perfect holiday, then you have to spend the next 10 minutes trawling through the site saying “but where exactly is it?”. Even some of the largest UK holiday websites are guilty of this!
The Pear Tree Cottage website features an interactive full width Google location map on two of the four key pages – perfect! The satellite image view was chosen for this to help give the viewer a sense of the surrounding green countryside too. Each of the pages also mentions the approximate location and local landmarks and attractions to further give the user a grasp of the location.
The Booking System
Pear Tree Cottage needed its own independent booking system, which could be integrated with the website. User experience was a key factor in choice of system, it was imperative to choose a very simple and straightforward system that would be familiar to anyone booking a holiday.
The system chosen was Bookalet, and this provided a fully customisable availability calendar and booking widget which sits seamlessly inside the Wix based website, meaning users stay on the original site the whole way through their booking process. The calendar makes perfect sense at first glance, the booking form is delightfully straightforward to fill in, and the backend of the booking system is easy for staff to navigate.
Letting the images do the talking
The old saying “A picture tells a thousand words” has never been more true than when it comes to booking a holiday. Lets face it, we may read the text about holiday accommodation we’re interested in, but if the pictures don’t capture our attention and draw us in, we’ll quickly move on to the next holiday option long before we read any of that carefully worded description!
The Pear Tree Cottage website opens on each page with a full screen image of the Shepherds Hut in its surroundings, which is then carefully backed up on key pages with detailed and varied images the user can scroll through to see more. The following description is carefully worded for SEO purposes, and backs up everything the user has seen in the images.
Fully responsive to desktop, tablet and mobiles
Set up & implementation of an external booking system
Image led design
Custom Contact Form
Google Maps integration
The Solution
The Wix based website and Bookalet booking combo provide the perfect solution for Pear Tree Cottage, delivering a visually stunning site, user friendly navigation and booking, and an easy to admin backend.
Website Features
I would recommend Effortless Websites. Fiona is not just going through the motions, she listens to your requirements, gets a very detailed brief (which is worth putting the effort into), consults along the way and is more than happy to receive feedback if an adjustment is needed.
Our experience with Effortless Websites was excellent. We are very pleased with the sites look and feel, and the good use of photography which helps to support the script.
I wish we would have started sooner – the website has already produced a holiday booking in its first week!
Veronica Coupland, Lonely Oak Event Hire Ltd.