Information Is Key To Better Web Design
By Glenn Haussman | bio August 8, 2001
 
 NEW YORK -- Creating a Website that manages to break through Internet clutter while also providing easy click-through access to room reservations is crucial to a hotel company’s success in the on-line community.
Since the infancy of the mainstream World Wide Web, programmers and designers have been continually adjusting and tweaking Website designs to better appeal to the masses in order to get them to reserve rooms on the spot.
At DVCI Technology, a NJ-based Website design firm, Vice President Martin Glovin oversees a team that has created Websites for Fortune 100 companies such as Howard Johnson, Subaru and Polaroid. He sees his job as a chance to try to entice consumers by applying psychology to get them to undertake a certain behavior.
For example, when it came to designing the Howard Johnson Website, Glovin said previous versions of the site gave the user a “poor experience.”
“They were not converting people on the site and we wanted to convert lookers into bookers,” said Glovin. “We use customer focus groups as a jumping-off point for design to decipher what the consumer needs and wants. To be successful and to do that, we looked at what was the quickest way to get [potential guests] to make a reservation.”
Glovin said a site must contain certain elements to entice guests to look further, while also ensuring the site is intuitive to use.
A winning site, said Glovin, is aesthetically pleasing and also gets the consumer to quickly understand what they will get at a specific property. Also, the right iconography is crucial to a guest’s understanding of what services and amenities will be available at a property they are considering visiting.
Another major element of an alluring site is one that has a robust search engine to help get consumers the most accurate information at the touch of a button.
“I think the new Hojo.com is designed to mirror where Howard Johnson is going. It is a middle-market-focused audience and we designed it to meet that audience, because you have to build something that meets the needs of consumers,” said Glovin.
Tasked with running Hilton’s Website division, Bruce Rosenberg believes the most important element of a hospitality Website is the completeness of the information on the site as well as the booking technology and reservation interfaces.
“The stars of our Website are the hotels, and people want an incredible amount of detail about what is available at each specific hotel,” said Rosenberg. “The more you put on the site, the more people want to read.”
According to Rosenberg, Hilton gets about 4 million hits per month on all the company’s branded Websites and those numbers rise an average 5% to 10% a month. Additionally, he said the sites have brought in more than $500 million in revenue in the first half of this year alone.
Additionally, Hilton’s latest site upgrade was the company’s fourth in six years, where the product matured from brochure-ware to a site with dynamic contact that also created a cohesive look and feel across all of the Hilton family of brands.
“People are getting more comfortable using the Web because it is the single biggest repository of information. The Web is in the fabric of peoples lives now and they go their first before the phone,” said Rosenberg.
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