Brief
Aura Maldives is the latest Indian Ocean resort to be launched by Pulse Hotels, owners of three other properties in the Maldives: Kandima, Nova and The Nautilus. With an opening scheduled for July 2026, Pulse approached us to design a world-class website to be launched in time for the soft opening and a teaser website to be live in less than a month.
Set in the elemental beauty of the Baa Atoll’s UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, Aura Maldives places mindfulness and wellbeing at the heart of its 5-star proposition.
Our initial task was to design and build a teaser website in double-quick time, which would then scale up to a full site for opening, once photographs and video becomes available.
Solution
After a short period of familiarisation to fully. immerse ourselves in Aura’s 'mindful' proposition, targetting both couples and families, we designed and prototyped two alternative concepts to bring the resort to life online.
Using the brand guidelines as inspiration, we explored different typographic and layout designs to convey the elegance and sophistication of this wellbeing-focused 5-star Maldivian experience, including a positioning video, image carousel and a 'timestamp’ device to convey all the experiences on offer during waking hours.
For any luxury website design, elegance relies on simplicity and balance, editing out any superfluous decoration, but using space and elemental tension to create a harmonious solution that works as well on a hand-held device, as it does on a desktop.
With few photographs currently available, we used renders and atmospheric imagery to create a representative mood and entice affluent target audiences in the primary markets of the UK, Europe, Gulf and US and encourage them to sign-up for a newsletter to keep them in touch, while the resort is completed and booking goes live in summer 2026.
For any teaser website, establishing an early SEO footprint is key, as well as ennnaging other important audiences across the travel industry, such as travel agencies and tour operators who are looking for new destinations for their discerning customers.
The selected design was finalised and the teaser site coded and launnched in under a week.
Results
The first phase teaser website was revealed in the first week of March with subsequent releases to expand the depth of content, phased over the following weeks, prior to the launch of the full website in summer 2026.
https://aura-maldives.com/
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