New website for Lydiard Park

We’re delighted to announce a new website for Lydiard Park, Hotel and Conference Centre.

Winning a competitive bid to work with the Lydiard management team and Swindon Borough Council to build their new website, we pulled out all the stops with brand new styling, features and functionality to make the new site a one-stop-shop for event tickets, hotel room booking, BBQ bookings and all enquiries about the park and the hotel.

Starting with scoping documents and wireframes, we used the content on the existing site coupled with usability analysis and focus groups to help form our thoughts. We suggesting splitting the site into three mini-sites – one for the park, one for the hotel & conference centre and one for weddings – an area of recent growth.

With easy-to-follow links from the homepage plus good ongoing organic SEO programmes to push people directly into the mini-site of relevance we believe that the architecture is the best fit for the business goals of the organisation.

The wireframe was tested by our focus group using content from the old site (which would be rewritten in time). It was positively received with only minor changes needed and so we progressed on to the design phase.

Our design team chose a teal, gold and blue colour scheme which oozes opulence and fits with the rebranding work going on in the hotel. Top level navigation allows visitors to swap between the mini-sites whilst second level navigation allows movement between the main pages in each section. Automatically generated third-level navigation in a sidebar provided links to relevant pages in each main section.

The main goals of the website were to:

• Create a visually stunning and mobile-responsive website which stood apart from the Swindon Borough Council website and which could easily be updated and maintained by the Lydiard Park management team
• Make it possible for visitors and guests to search for, book and pay for hotel accommodation
• Advertise and sell tickets for public events held in the park
• Bring BBQ sales onto the platform, allowing visitors to see pitch availability. In turn, make it easy for the wardens to see who had booked which pitches on which days
• Create a small online shop to sell gifts from the museum and garden centre.

We made good use of various plugins from WooCommerce to offer the BBQ bookings and event ticketing functionality, whilst an integration with third-party suppliers Rezlynx Guestline powers the hotel accommodation booking system.

Through our photography and videography arm, we also created a short promotional video for the team and we took the photos used on most of the banner images on the site.

We’re now starting a digital marketing programme including organic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and PPC (Pay Per Click) to help drive traffic to the site and boost sales.

We hope you’ll agree that the new Lydiard Park website looks great – we’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with Swindon Borough Council and the Lydiard Park management team on this one.