Sometimes the look may be simple but behind the scenes a series of challenges needs to be met making development much more of challenge than the design seems.

I was recently commissioned to create a website design framework for a large national Hotel website portal – the type that provides a booking service an array of hotels.

The brief was to design a series of pre-defined templates, in to which a set of already established data feeds would automatically link. The design had to be professional, have a number of layout variants, be flexible but not too difficult for customers to use to add additional data to.  In short it had to be a framework driven set of designs that could be sold to hotels for them to achieve a simple yet effective website where the styling was flexible in some ways but ridged in others.

The final result, an initial series of 6 designs ranging from traditional to contemporary (traditional b&b design can be seen on the right) took into consideration back end user experience management, simplicity and effectiveness of use.  Although the website designs are simple, the restrictions for the layouts where rigid and needed to perform a specific set of detailed tasks.

Designs commissioned by a leading North West Design and Marketing Agency