Website Hotel de Logerij

Hotel de Logerij, not just a hotel

Situated just a 5 minutes walk from the marvellous dutch North Sea coast in Renesse you'll find the most ideal holiday spot in Zeeland: Hotel de Logerij. If your looking for calmness and comfort or if you just want a temporary hospitable home, Hotel de Logery marks the spot. A simple accomodation without overdone abundance where you can meet with the Zeeuwse integrity and conciseness.

Hotel de logerij, It's just that simple ....

Timeless and constant change

The Zeeuwse environment reflects a timeless feeling. That's one thing they cannot say about the development on the Internet.

Hotel de Logerij profiles itself since 2001 on the Internet with it's own website. This website was provided with a Content Management System and a bookingsystem called 'Recreatie Zeeland' and was build by ZeelandNet, where at that time, Marko van der Puil (founder of Brains4All) was leading this project.

Due to his function at ZeelandNet, Marko was responsible for the communication between recreation entrepreneurs and the projectteam. Because a lot of entrepreneurs were very contented about the ongoing cooperation, they stayed in touch with Marko even after he'd left ZeelandNet in 2005.

Hotel de Logerij was one of the entrepreneurs that stayed in touch with Marko and this way automatically with Brains4All. In 2007 we worked together in a project called the SchouwenDuivelandPas in which the manager of Hotel de Logerij was strongly involved concerning the organisation.

Again a pleasant cooperation led to a new project. In 2008 a start was made designing a new website's face. Next to this, our recently developed Content Management System was put in the back-end as a management tool in order that maintainance of the website is made as easy as possible.

Step by step

Though communication went on a personal level, we setup a project on our extranet to serve as a communication platform. With this step we physically started the project.

Working this way makes all communication centrally accessible for a everyone involved in the project. Everyone is kept informed about the most actual changes and is able to anticipate at any moment. Continuous contribution of anyone involved leads to the most effective result.

After a thorough inventarisation of needs, wants and wishes and after collecting initial images I started designing the new 'look and feel' of the design in photoshop. I made a first proposal in the extranet to get feedback from everyone. Keeping this feedback in mind I adjusted the design and shared this new design again on the extranet. Designing in small iterative steps, we fine tuned the design.

Now we've reached the point of contentment on the design, our development server was set up for the project and a start was made coding the xhtml and css.

Customised?

Finishing the xhtml and css on the front-end, for this project the Content Management System was customised in the back-end.

How often do you see software that's designed from a developer's point of view? Getting lost in a jungle of features that are totally redundant and useless. No! Get your focus on what's really needed. This is the first step creating software that's really valuable to a customer.

Having this knowledge we personally interviewed our existing customers. The outcome of this research combined with our in-house expertise as usabilty experts resulted in an easy to use Content Management System providing pure basic needs.

What about the outcome of this research? What issues were so important according to our customers? We'll, I've listed them.

Important were things like having:

• an intuitive to use management tool with which you can easily publish any information like text, images and files,
• some influence on being found within search engines,
• some way in which visitors can interact with the customer, like a feedback formular,
• a way to analise vistitor statistics.

Example of howto add/edit so called META information:

Now having a tool that covers these basic needs, of course the system can be expanded with extra needed customer dependent functionality. Below I've listed functionality added to the Content Management System of Hotel de Logerij:

• function to publish and maintain news messages,
• newsletter functionality:
  • a way to subscribe to a news letter,
  • markup and send news letters,
  • create and maintain news letters subscriber lists,
• a spam-free guestbook,
• photo album with unlimited chapters.

Finishing touch

Now having a full operational website, the content managers of Hotel de Logerij could freely practise the within Content Management System on the development environment while on another location the actual content was marked up.

Website front-end 2008 - 2001

On Tuesday 29th of april 2008, we launched the new website of Hotel de Logerij. If you want to take a look or come to enjoy the beautifull dutch beaches, please visit Hotel de Logerij.