Dottourism.com

Project Insight: Design for new Mahindra Homestays website

19 September 2011 | Kate Waite

After we had completed the wireframe for the Mahindra Homestays website re-development project (which you can read about here) we moved onto the actual design of the site. This is a really exciting phase of the website development as you start to get an idea of what the finished site will look like.

Prior to starting the design we take the time to write up a full design brief for the project. This helps everyone involved focus on important elements of the project which will have an impact on the ultimate look and feel of the site.

Our design brief normally includes a company profile to look at the positioning of the brand, analysis of their current market situation, details on brand charter or style guidelines, analysis of the target market and specific design notes relating to style, typography and colour.

It is also useful to do an inventory of assets at this point. In travel, imagery is of particular importance so taking stock of what the client has available and planning to commission or research stock photography to fill in any gaps is important. We catalogued over 500 images which were required for the site, as early image management saves time later on and we knew we would be using images in the design phase which would later be used on the site.

 

In many projects we take responsibility for the brand and logo development, in which case we will create our own brand guidelines which the client can then share with anybody involved in any design work in the future. For Mahindra Homestays this already existed and so careful reference to their brand charter was required, with specific guidelines to adhere to in terms of colour, font and logo usage.

 

The design brief enables us to look at the message that we want to get across on the site. For Mahindra it was essential that the new website was able to reassure visitors about the safety and integrity of the Mahindra brand, installing confidence to make an online booking.

With the wireframe giving us a clear direction on the layout and positioning of all the key site elements we started on the design of the homepage. We knew we wanted to incorporate strong imagery with the strong brand colours to highlight the all important accommodation search function on the site.

 

We carried on the same colour usage to the footer, adding textured details inspired by and simplified from traditional Indian design seen on elaborate fabrics and henna tattoos.

 

At each stage of the design process we were feeding pages back to the Mahindra Homestays marketing team giving them opportunity to provide feedback and to ensure they were happy we were keeping within brand guidelines.

There were several design elements that had to be tacked individually, such as the icons on the homestay detail pages to represent the available facilities.

 

With the wireframe to guide us we continued to work through the site, taking the plain page layout and creating the design using the strong brand colours and imagery. By the time the design phase was complete we had created over 60 pages as layered PSDs ready to be coded as page templates for the finished site.

Read about the full case study.