A chic and majestic French-style boutique hotel & restaurant in Istanbul

Screenshots

Customer Requirements

The Georges Hotel opened its doors in the summer of 2011 and released its first website designed by an independent web developer (see picture). This website was simple and functional but suffered from a lack of finish in the design. Moreover it was quite difficult to update and maintain and was not optimized for search engines. The management commissioned ISTANBUL IT SERVICES to design and develop a new website better reflecting the “French touch” and luxury atmosphere of the hotel.

This elegant boutique hotel, situated in a fully renovated historical landmark near Galata Tower in Istanbul, is devoted to offer an extraordinary experience to its customers, with rooms and suites with beautiful views on the Bosphorus, and a cozy restaurant, Le Fumoir, serving the best of French cuisine. The opening of 2 other Georges Hotels in Istanbul is planned for 2012.

Project Challenges

This project challenges were to:

• Release the website as soon as possible: we committed ourselves to achieve this in two weeks.
• Create a new design: we used the font of the logo and the lilies that are the mark and symbol of the hotel. We also used its brick wall and carved wooden ceiling in our design to make visitors have a better feel for the cozy atmosphere of the hotel.
• Add modern web functionalities: integration of Facebook & Twitter accounts, split picture slider on the home page, embedded Google Maps on the contact page…

Finally, the optimization of the website visibility on search engines was a major concern for Georges Hotel because a large part of the booking is made online.

Our solution

• Simpler Design: we designed a sober and simple layout with full CSS and a screen resolution of 1024*768 pixels. We also designed elegant and dynamic picture sliders to frame about 90 high resolution pictures of the hotel.
• Simpler CMS: we used WordPress CMS and its advanced features to build a SEO-friendly website that is easy to manage.
• Simpler Language management: we used WordPress advanced features to manage all the linguistic versions in the same content management interface.
• Better SEO: we added about 3,000 words of SEO optimized content in French, English and Turkish, and also added Google-friendly features (XML sitemap, Google Analytics account…).

Results

We released the website 2 weeks after the project starting date. Our client was highly satisfied and asked us ISTANBUL IT SERVICES to take care of additional language developements and some of content updates. We released the French version -a must for this French touch hotel- 2 days after the website release. Chinese and Portuguese versions are expected very soon to make the hotel information more accessible to Asian and Brazilian customers.