Hotel Deepa Comforts
Brand site and a CMS for a Mangaluru hotel, covering rooms, dining, banquets and enquiries, with events, gallery and guest reviews run by the hotel itself.
The problem
Hotel Deepa Comforts is a long established three star business hotel in Kodialbail, Mangaluru, with thousands of reviews behind it. The site it had did not say that. It was dated against what other hotels in the city had moved to by then: largely static, informational, with little for a visitor to actually do.
The work came through a friend from the college club, whose family owns the hotel.
A hotel site has two jobs that pull in different directions. It has to sell the place, which means rooms, restaurants, banquet halls and the pictures that go with them. And a good part of it changes constantly, since events, photographs and guest reviews are not the kind of content anyone should be opening an editor to update.
Approach
Two applications. The public site, and a CMS the hotel runs itself.
The site covers what a guest or an event organiser is looking for: accommodation, restaurants, banquet halls, services, a gallery, and the hotel's own story. The enquiry sits directly under the hero rather than on a contact page, taking an email and the two dates that matter, because somebody deciding where to stay should not have to go and find a form.
Rooms are the other decision, and they come in three grades. Rather than three pages or one long list, the page switches between deluxe, premium and suite in place, so the comparison happens without navigating.
Banquet halls are the hotel's other business, and they are sold on the room itself, so that page leads with the space at full width and the rest of the halls underneath it.
The CMS is where the parts that change live. Staff sign in and manage three things: events, which surface on the site as what is on; the gallery; and reviews.
Reviews are the piece worth explaining. A guest writes one on the public site and it does not appear. It lands in the CMS as a submission, where staff approve it, and can then turn its display on or off independently of that approval. So a review can be accepted and still held back, which is the difference between moderating and simply publishing.
The gallery is the clearest case of why the CMS exists: it is nothing but content, it changes, and it is the hotel's to change.
Supabase carries the data, the authentication behind the CMS, and the images. Enquiries leave through Web3Forms rather than a mail server, since the hotel needs them in an inbox and nothing more than that.
Outcome
The old site had no way to take an enquiry. A visitor who wanted a room or a hall had nothing to fill in, so interest that arrived on the site left again. Dates and an email now reach the hotel's inbox from the first screen.
What changed
- The site takes enquiries, which the old one had no way to do
- Events, gallery and reviews are published by hotel staff without a developer
- Still the hotel's site