Cedar court garden with fountain

Cedar Court Hotels

High-performing website to boost bookings for hotel chain

  • +144% Traffic increase
  • +111% Transaction increase
  • +56% Top 3 keyword positions improvement
  • +58% Revenue increase

Project overview

Cedar Court is a hotel chain comprising of four beautiful residences in Bradford, Harrogate, Huddersfield, and Wakefield.

All four hotels had websites that were not in line with each other, causing confusion within the group, and a lack of brand coherence.

A solution was required to unite the chain, as well as solve other problematic pain points that the client had brought to our attention.

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The brief

The challenge presented by the client was to redevelop the Cedar Court Hotels website while empowering the team with a custom drag-and-drop interface that allows full control over each page - while maintaining brand integrity.

Not only that, but the Cedar Court Hotels team found the existing site difficult to update and maintain.

There were also booking systems that were operating independently from the website interactions. This resulted in vast amounts of time being spent on needless administration when the integrations could be automated seamlessly by the website itself.

We needed to consolidate the pain points whilst delivering a top-performing, accessible yet user-friendly, solution.

Cedar Court Harrogate homepage mobile view

How we did it

The site design was provided to us by our design partner UBD, with whom we collaborated closely to finalise the intended functionality of the site with UX and usability our focus.

The entire project was a true collaborative effort between three third-party marketing agencies and an integrated booking service provider. This meant that the co-ordination of the project had to be on point to ensure that all involved parties were fully up-to-speed on the project status in order to meet the deliverable deadline.

The chosen platform for the site was WordPress, which required a lot of bespoke code in order to meet the brief.

Each page was to be driven by a set of bespoke components, including booking engine integrations, blog and events filtering, various contact forms, call to action buttons, image carousels, image and text sections, and mailing list integration.

These components provide users with the ability to create some unique and engaging pages, whilst remaining within the design guidelines and wider Cedar Court Hotel brand - a stunning high performing site.

“We worked with Herd on a complete website redesign and build as our existing site was no longer fit for purpose. Immediately, we felt at ease with the team at Herd's approach. The data they had gathered highlighted to us where we could be performing much better, and how we could do so. The build process was an enjoyable one and they delivered us a top-class product both on budget and time."

Stewart Moss Group Director of Sales & Marketing, Cedar Court Hotels Yorkshire

Project highlights

By using the latest technologies and web standards, we were able to make great improvements to site speed, performance, and usability.

Our developers completely re-coded the standard functionality of the WordPress filtering system to satisfy the brief that was set by the client. Users can search for events or activities by date, location, and category simultaneously.

The development team created a component-driven site in Word Press, allowing the Cedar Court Hotel team the freedom to create custom layouts whilst maintaining the site's look and feel.

Overall site performance, accessibility, and user experience was improved dramatically from the existing website, which was dated and due a complete refresh.

We worked closely with UBD design agency to identify and comprehend user journeys, and provide a superior user experience, facilitating increases in user conversion rate and time spent on page.

Implemented a mobile-first approach from the ground up, focusing on mobile experience given 60% of the Cedar Court audience are using mobiles.