Brief
As inventors of the ‘luxury hideaway resorts’ concept, now so widely emulated by others, Amanresorts has always been the setter of high standards. When it came to redesigning its suite of 19 websites Aman, naturally, sought-out the best advice.
After a global search, Nucleus was selected in late 2006 and we set about a complete transformation of their web presence. Our brief was to create a new benchmark in luxury resort websites.
Solution
First we defined Aman’s detailed requirements followed by a ‘global’ content architecture and navigational schema. Once approved, we designed a stylish user interface that infuses the user experience with rich imagery of their staggeringly beautiful properties. Individual resorts conforms to the design, but are personalised with emotive content and discrete branding. We used advanced compression techniques to enable very large photographs to be used – a first, now widely copied. The design is sleek and simple; less can be more, when you know how. We also created a new technical platform, based around Ektron CMS 400, and a highly customised online booking system based on Fidelio. The latter combines availability and prices from the PMS with rich content from the CMS, while disciplined use of AJAX enhances the user experience. SEO was tuned and deployed to intercept general location searches.
Results
Since launch in August 2007 the new Amanresorts websites have delivered traffic and bookings well ahead of expectations. The portal and resort websites – now grown to 24 – are subject to our continuous enhancements and language releases and are now hosted with Nucleus Managed Services, with a content distribution network in Asia, USA and Europe. The website was a Silver winner in the W3 Awards 2008 amongst many other accolades.