Cornish Holiday Cottages
40 years strong and still in the family
Website redesign
Website re-platform
Cornish Holiday Cottages have helped visitors to Cornwall make lasting memories since 1978 through their portfolio of 90 coastal holiday homes in and around the Falmouth and Helford River areas.
Family run and oriented, CHC’s organic evolution over the last 40 or so years has been consciously tempered to ensure that the company maintains an intimate relationship with guests and holiday cottage owners, and that their passionate team are able to provide a bespoke service.
“Here for you”
CHC’s openness, devotion, enthusiasm and experience are what set them apart.
‘Here for you’ sits at the very heart of their brand, embodying the original values of the founder that still guide their approach today. They are available to holiday home owners and their guests around the clock and aim to save their customers time in their search for holiday homes by leveraging the honesty and knowledge built up over 40+ years.
The team at CHC felt that their digital experience didn’t reflect this proposition nor match up with their service offering, so came to Gendall to with a brief to bring their website up to date.
Our challenge?
Bring together a new multi-channel booking system and conversion-focused UX, with a new website design that reflects the company’s ethos and proposition and focuses on spending fun, family time in the Helford and Falmouth area.
"At a time when the personal touch is being lost by smaller agencies being taken over by large corporates, we continue to focus on the individual needs of our customers, as we have always done."
After around 5 years of life, CHC came to look at their brand elements (logo, colours and fonts) with a different perspective - particularly taken out of the context of the website design - arriving at the conclusion that they no longer represented the socially-conscious, modern business that they had grown into.
The website design and branding as a whole were coherent, but in seeing the logo in isolation alongside competitor and comparator logos, it made them feel like they are a bit behind the times.
Goal: to present a more modern brand visual identity to customers, business partners & affiliates to further differentiate from closest competitors and convey the company values.
A starfish has been the main icon in their logo for a long time and is key to customer recognition, so needed to be retained. CHC see this embodying the fact they are a family business that has ties to the local community and they are open, approachable and honest.
CHC were concerned that it wasn't clear enough that they are an independent, family business, not a conglomerate agency.
In exploring styles for a more modern identity, a 'Matisse'-esque style was landed upon for its use of colours and shapes - including what a new starfish icon could lokok like. More abstract than the existing version, but by taking out some of the detail, it became more scalable for digital use. A more mature colour palette, with colours inspired by the landscape around the coast, now accompanies a sharper, crisper family of fonts.
Illustrations by Millie Wilkins
Jam first please!
CHC’s old platform was monolithic and the site UI & UX was dated. With a refreshed design our development team broke the website down into composable components that were served from a WordPress backend. These could be added, arranged and edited by their in-house marketing team.
For sourcing the dynamic booking data we built a GraphQL application to resolve and mutate Anytime Booking API data. The booking system data (along with data from WordPress and a few other APIs) is compiled whilst Gatsby is building the site into static files. This means users see near instant page transitions with the trade off being that the marketing team wait a few seconds for content updates in the CMS. A sensible compromise given the importance of a healthy performance score. Any truly dynamic data such as booking availability is fetched client side. Making sure data is always up to date.
The checkout was built to consist of four phases:
Customer details
Extras
Review & pay
Confirmation
Followed by confirmation and summary, when the transaction and booking is confirmed.
As with most checkout journeys, the checkout was stripped down so that there are fewer distractions, and users have encouragement to navigate away to other pages. Our bespoke GraphQL application was used handle all aspects of customer data and account creation, with no details being stored within the CMS.
Using this Javascript APIs & Markdown (JAM) Stack we have future proofed the website, moving it a long way forward from its monolithic ancestor. If a change of booking data is required, we can connect up a new API’s endpoints and resolve so that the frontend receives the data, in the structure it’s expecting. New frontend React components can be rolled out on a continuous deployment, giving Cornish Holiday Cottages the competitive tech and design edge they were looking for.
"We can move quicker to integrate other APIs into the content mesh with our tech stack. This gives CHC the reassurance that if they need to change quickly – they can. "
— Ed Wilson, development lead
