As of the present, the Maya Hotel booking function is run at the front desk of the hotel. A client walks in and chooses his room, and the receptionist books the client to the same. While this method is practical for a small business, it has, over time, proved to be ineffective for Maya Hotel as the business has expanded over the years. This has led to clients, at times, being forced to queue as they wait to be served. Clients also take time choosing their desirable rooms, thus creating bottlenecks at the front desk.
Websites present an economical and effective way in which to increase the productivity of a business. This is by increasing the consumer base of a business and/or increasing the efficiency with which the business can be run. Owing to the problems currently faced by the Mayan hotel, a website providing online booking services would alleviate this problem. The efficiency of the business will be greatly increased by the online booking functionality of the website, which will enable real-time booking by the clients hence doing away with the time consuming and labor-intensive manual method that is currently in place. Clients will also be able to take as much time as they wish in choosing their desirable rooms from the comfort of their computers at home. In addition to this, the website will serve the function of increasing the hotel’s customer base by tapping into the huge internet user base.
Website Page List
The website will have a number of pages so as to capture all the requirements of the hotel. These pages will be as follows:
- A home page: this will be the first page that a visitor will open on visiting the Maya hotel website
- Online booking page: This page will present the client with the option of booking a room in the hotel.
- Services page: this page will highlight various other services that the hotel offers.
- About us: This page will provide a detailed history of the hotel, its policies, and past achievements.
- Contact us page: In this page, detailed contact information will be availed
Website design
When developing the website for Maya Hotel, a number of issues will be taken into consideration. The first issue to be taken into consideration when coming up with the website will be its design. This will be greatly determined by the audience that the website is created for. The audience of the Mayan Hotel will be its major customers who are mostly married couples of all ages seeking to enjoy time away from their busy lives.
A serene backdrop to the web pages and a cool color scheme will, therefore, be most appropriate as it will communicate what the Maya Hotel is offering to its prospective clients; peace and tranquility. Since the homepage is the first page that will be viewed on visiting the site, it makes sense to ensure that this page is designed in a manner that is both attractive and informative.
The Maya Hotel website will utilize various multimedia to ensure the creation of both informative and attractive web content. Video clips will be placed in the “about us” section of the website so as to afford prospective clients a better glimpse of the services that the hotel provides. Elaborate photos of the rooms and the scenic views that one can obtain from the rooms will also be provided in the booking section so as to assist clients as they select their rooms of choice. However, care will be taken not to overuse media such as video clips and photos since, due to their relatively large size, they may slow down the loading of pages by the client’s browsers. A compromise will, therefore, be reached to utilize this multimedia in a manner that does not affect the efficiency of the website.
Website Structure
The key to a successful website has an easy website which the visitors of the website can navigate through easily. Every page should, therefore, be accessible with the least amount of effort by the visitors. Since the primary objective of the website is the online booking functionality, the webpage for booking shall be the first one so as to ensure that the client can access it without any trouble. In addition to this, ensuring that this webpage is in the top two tiers of the website will increase the probability of search engine spiders indexing it hence making it easy to find through the various commercial search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
From the structure illustrated above, it is clear that the visitor will be able to view at a glance all the important pages that are available on the website. The homepage will provide links to all the pages in the 2nd Tier, therefore, ensuring ease of navigation. In addition to this, the logic of the structure is in an intuitive hierarchical manner, thus ensuring that the visitor will be able to access all pages without any trouble.
Conclusion
In this website plan, a preliminary website design that will serve as a blueprint from which a well organized and effective web site will be developed has been given. The major aims of this design have been to provide an attractive website that is both easy and intuitive for the clients to navigate through. To this end, various design considerations have been given. From this paper, a workable plan for a robust website has been given. It is hoped that this will help the Maya Hotel to achieve its online booking goals, therefore, leading to increased efficiency and the probability of new clients owing to the marketing capability of the internet.