Project case study
38 St Giles, Norwich
A cut above your average b & b
Summary
38 St Giles is a boutique bed and breakfast in Norwich that provides a delightful, private place to stay.
Objective
38 St Giles is neither a hotel nor just a traditional b & b, but something much more special and personal. Run by Jan and William Cheeseman, who used to own two fine delicatessens in Norwich, the rooms in this beautiful georgian building have been designed with a contemporary and luxurious feel that provide the comfort and style more often found in boutique hotels. They needed a website to attract visitors and supplement the enthusiastic word of mouth that was promoting them.
Solution
They already had some publicity material in place, and so the site’s design evolved as an extension to their logo (by Coco) and the flyer they’d produced for local marketing (by Kettle of Fish Design). The purpose was to provide a taster of the beautiful and tasteful accommodation and evoke a feeling of warmth, intimacy and luxury, so slideshows of close-up photography focus on details.
On the internet success breeds success. We’d noticed that a lot of traffic was coming from Tripdvisor to boutique bed and breakfast, 38 St Giles. We’d also noticed that their reviews were flagged up in Google Local which powers the mapped section at the top of its search results page for locally related searches. We knew too that reading other people’s reviews is often a good way to help convince a prospective client that their decision will be the right one. Tripadvisor wisely provide a widget that allows you to display the reviews that their users have provided on your own website, so we added it to a reviews page at 38 St Giles and customised it to fit in with their design.
But in having your profile raised you also can become a target for some of the lower forms of life that lurk out there on the web. Some people write nice things about you, but others may try to take advantage of you, and automated spam messages sent through their contact form were becoming a persistent problem to 38 St Giles. So we added a captcha field to the form and that has helped cut fake messages substantially.
Client
Sector
- Tourism & Leisure
Date
December 2007 +
Services provided
Status
Live