Hotel-Restaurant Wanders' website
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Client: Hotel-Restaurant Wanders
Place: Elten-Emmerich, Germany
Year: 2006
Highlights:
In December 2005 I was appointed by the owners of Hotel-Restaurant Wanders,
(a German hotel run since almost 3 centuries ago by the family Wanders) to design and author their trilingual website.
The client asked me to redesign their previous website, a site-brochure online, without a defined navigational architecturte and with poor look and feel. After a couple of meetings with the client I helped them to redefine the structure of their website, and presented to them 3 different proposals for the GUI. The main idea was a simple, elegant and user-friendly interface, with the look and feel based on Hotel Wanders' core values: simplicity, trustworthiness and a very famiy-oriented environment.
My design solution is a simple and very elegant one: a flash bar with a slides-collage disolving on top of the navigational bar, combined with a no-tables css and java-based design.
The chosen GUI uses a simple and unconventional navigational system:
the main navigation takes place as normally happens in almost every website: on the top navigational bar, however the subnavigation uses a completely new approach, simple an intuitive, as it appears on a magazine format, and presented as sub-headlines under the main Headline (showing the title of the visited section).
The design process was a very particular and enticing case of mutual co-operation and co-design between designer and client.
Bettina Wanders, one of the owners of Hotel Wanders is also a very good graphic designer, her valuable participation was a key factor in the website's architecture and imagery selection, all the Galleries and imagery for the flash bars are the result
of a team work. She chose most of the images used (as you will see on the website's credits), many of the photos
were also a result of her creativity.
The animation concept on the main page
is to a good extent the result of Bettina Wanders' suggestions.