Website Redesign

Mahindra Homestays

Summary

We were asked to redesign the Mahindra Homestays website to improve the usability and customer journey to help improve booking conversions.

Background

Mahindra Homestays is a unique Indian accommodation network. Dot Tourism have been working with Mahindra Homestays for a number of years on their online marketing, including development of an authoritative Indian travel blog which receives in excess of 10,000 visits a month, social media management of their lively Facebook and Twitter communities and search marketing. You can find out more about our work with Mahindra Homestays in our services PDF download.

As the brand grew it became important that the website was able to convert visitors into bookings. A complicated registration process, inability to book multiple homestays or itineraries and a lack of destination content were key elements to be addressed.

Results

We started to tackle this large project by looking at how visitors were using the current website and their navigation journeys. We invited people to fill out a survey so that we could understand what information they were looking for and most importantly what was holding them back from making a booking.

Our research confirmed that visitors were being put off by the long registration process and that there was a lack of information about some of the homestays, such as lists of facilities and exact locations. Read about the research we did for the project in our blog post.

For the next stage of the project we developed wireframe prototypes for the new site to allow the marketing team at Mahindra Homestays to understand the layout and proposed visitor journey. The capacity of the site was increased with provisions for several new content sections allowing for more detailed information about the homestay experience, individual destinations and trip planning advice and enhanced listings for the homestays themselves.

From single page entries on the old site we recommended that each homestay would have its own subsection, allowing people to see large photos in a gallery, check the facilities at a glance, see the exact location plotted onto an interactive Google Map and find out about activities offered within the homestay and nearby attractions. Find out more about the importance of wireframes and how they were used in the project in our blog post.

With a very active social media following we were also keen to integrate this into the site with blog feeds for each individual destination and the addition of embedded video content from their popular YouTube channel onto homestay listings, giving people the opportunity to take a tour of the homes.

After the wireframes had been signed off we started on the design phase of the development. We were keen to ensure that the new site would be able to incorporate strong Indian imagery with a fresh, colourful look that reflected the brand.  With such a large site there were several aspects to consider resulting in delivery of over 60 layered PSD files. The technical implementation of the site was to be passed to Mahindra Homestays own in house technical team, but to assist with the development we delivered the entire site in standards compliant XHTML. We ensured all JavaScript elements, such as calendars for the booking system, and the Google Mapping API was fully functional. Prior to handing over the complete site we undertook extensive browser testing.

The new phase of the new site was launched in August 2011 with further development and updates planned to be rolled out over the forthcoming months. The new design and navigation has already received many favourable industry comments and we have already seen significantly increased visitor engagement levels and booking conversions.

Visit Website