Accommodation · tourism
Lake Hayes
Luxury lakefront accommodation with two distinct offerings — lodge and cottages — separated cleanly so guests book the right one.
- Role
- Design & front-end build
- Year
- 2023
- Location
- Queenstown
The situation
Lake Hayes offers luxury lakefront accommodation near Queenstown across two quite different products: the lodge and the cottages. The site needed to present both without confusing guests about which they were looking at, while doing justice to one of the best outlooks in the country.
What I did
- 01A clear split between lodge and cottages, established immediately in the navigation
- 02Full-bleed landscape photography treated as the main event
- 03A persistent Book Now route that follows the guest through the site
- 04A restrained palette and type treatment that stays out of the scenery's way
- 05Mobile-first layouts for guests researching a trip on their phone
How it went
From first conversation to live.
- 01
Discovery
The core risk was confusion. A guest who books a cottage expecting the lodge — or the reverse — is a bad review waiting to happen. So the first structural decision was that the split had to happen immediately, in the navigation, before a guest invests any time going down the wrong path.
- 02
Look & feel
When your property looks out over Lake Hayes, the design job is mostly restraint. We built the direction around full-bleed landscape photography, with a palette pulled from the setting itself — greys, tussock, water — and typography quiet enough to stay out of the view.
- 03
Build
Lodge and cottages were built as parallel branches rather than sections of one page, each with its own imagery and detail, while a persistent Book Now follows the guest throughout. Layouts were built mobile-first, since most of this research happens on a phone.
- 04
Launch
Launched with both offerings live and photography optimised so the large landscape imagery still loads quickly.
- 05
Support
Seasonal imagery and rate updates handled as they come up.
Notable
- Two distinct products separated at the top level of navigation
- Full-bleed landscape photography as the primary persuasion
- Persistent Book Now that follows the guest
- Palette drawn from the landscape rather than imposed on it
- Mobile-first for evening trip research
The result
Two offerings presented distinctly on one site, with the setting doing the persuading.
On a phone
Delivered through a New Zealand agency
Let's see what your website could be.
Tell me a bit about your business and I'll show you what's possible — no obligation.
Prefer email? sam@digitalhouse.nz