Responses by Daniele Bianda, cofounder, and Roberto Uboldi, lead designer, Positioner

Background: Casa Cook Hotels is a group of boutique beach resorts that caters to a growing generation of independent travelers, offering simple, laid-back luxury at the beach. The purpose of the website is to increase brand awareness through a careful presentation of the properties in a simple, efficient way.

Design core: One of the central elements of the website is the booking engine, which is carefully positioned as a clear, visible call to action for visitors who are interested. The simple design, without any meaningless or decorative elements, keeps the focus on the site’s content and the brand’s purpose. It represents an editorial, hip style, and the mellow grey color scheme accentuates the intended overall brand personality.

Favorite details: We are very proud of the site’s simplicity and the elegant user experience design, which doesn’t overwhelm the visitors but guides them towards the much-desired conversions into customers. The powerful, emotional visual language also adds significant value to the visitors in order to provide them with a memorable experience while browsing.

Challenges: The most challenging aspects of tailoring this website were the booking engine integration and also the process to achieve an efficient, fast, user-friendly and straightforward booking experience for all users. In addition, the project was under a strict time constraint of three months, during which the website was designed and developed from scratch. Some things we would do differently are to include more video content and a few more animations.

Navigation design: When designing a website, we pay special attention and devote a decent amount of time into developing the navigation, as it is the central part of the user experience. We plan everything ahead by having the point of view of the users and their perspective as our focus. Starting from the users’ real needs and tendencies, we try to maintain the simplest and straightforward approach. One special feature we integrated into the navigation is a dedicated teaser on the homepage, which leads visitors to a tailored page where they can experience the properties from the Casa Cook point of view.

Technology: We developed and managed the website in Umbraco, which is an open-source CMS platform. Some of the design software we used to develop this project are Sketch, Zeplin and Marvel.