Our web design for this luxury hotel, golf and spa complex resulted in an 83% increase of website visitors within the first six months.

Stoke by Nayland Hotel, Golf & Spa needed a solution that would not only support the hotel’s brand refresh and three business activities, but also make things much easier for the small in-house marketing team.

Stoke by Nayland’s previous website was dated and did a poor job of presenting its two championship golf courses, four-star hotel, and luxurious spa. Moreover, the structure of the content management system hindered marketing activities — the editing of content was laborious, and promoting content on different sections of the site required multiple entries into the CMS.

Our design had two key objectives: i) to give visitors a sense of the beautiful location, excellent amenities, and stunning golf courses through strong visual design and photography, and ii) to oversee an update of the Drupal CMS that would introduce an improved information architecture to streamline editing and content management.

Along with the hotel website design, we were also charged with producing new photography for the venue. That allowed us to put stunning photography taken by one of preferred photographers, the award-winning Terry Morris, at the centre of our design. Stoke by Nayland has an extensive offering and a number of different audiences to reach, so we used subtle colour accents to help users distinguish the different sections of the site, and provide the marketing team with a colour scheme that they could use in promotional efforts.

On the backend, we designed a new content structure that followed a COPE (create once, publish everywhere) principle. Now, if the marketing team want to create a new spa package as part of a Summer promotion, they just create a new “promotion” page and then select which sections of the site it will appear in (e.g. homepage, spa, special offers). Those pages are also designed to work as landing pages in support of PPC and email marketing campaigns.

The resulting hotel website design draws people in through the use of colour, texture and strong visuals, then effectively communicates the unique offering of Stoke by Nayland, whilst making the work of those who manage and update the website a good deal simpler.

Success Factors

In the six months after the new website’s launch Stoke by Nayland saw a marked increase in visitors and a significant increase in engagement. Furthermore, the streamlined content management and promotions process has achieved the goal of reducing the amount of time the marketing team spend on creating offers and promotions, which has allowed them to invest more resource into other activities, such as email marketing and developing new commercial opportunities. The SbN team are so satisfied by the results, that they are now discussing ways in which we can develop the site and online brand further.

“For Tribus Creative every business has a story and that story is what shapes and defines business brands.

When we undertook this process with Tribus they rigorously applied that principle to Stoke by Nayland Hotel, spending time understanding SbN culture by speaking to Directors, Heads of Department and team members on the ground.

This attention to detail was reflected in their first design concepts. Tribus Creative took on board everything that we strive to offer our guests, the complexity of our business, the many stories that vie for attention and everything in between – the result was a fluid cohesion of beautiful design and elegant functionality.

Ours was a unique case in that we had another party already commissioned as the website developer, but Tribus Creative project managed the whole process – initial html concepts, photoshoot, communication of functionality, and testing – flawlessly.

In fact, since the switch to our new website we have seen an increase in referral traffic of 85% and page views have increased by 69%.

Our new Stoke by Nayland Hotel website is a true reflection of everything that defines SbN – our personality, our commitment to guests and our values are beautifully represented and we could not have achieved that without the care and attention of the Tribus Team.”Marijke Morris, Commercial Manager, Stoke by Nayland