The Problem
The Queens Hotel is a Barrie, Ontario Landmark. At over 100 years old, it has a rich history at it’s downtown location. The Queens caters to the local community offering a social destination to meet a large demographic. The Queens has two distict sections, a Sports Pub and a Dance Club, as well as a full menu provided by their onsite caterer Cosimos.
The Queens existing web site contained older web technologies, and was completely static. Updating for the popular site was becoming cumbersome and time-consuming.
The Queens was looking to update their image and web technology to allow for dynamic content and improved customer interaction.
Solution
Together with a couple of colleagues (collectively naming ourselves Tenchi Designs for the project) , we set out to redefine the Queens online image. First off, we established a splash page of sorts that allowed users to choose the side of the Queens they were most interested in (Pub or Dance), along with common links to newly implemented customer perks.
Newly implemented items to increase customer interaction and traffic to the site included: Guest list sign-up, DJ-request form, a Newsletter/Mailing list, fully functional calendar, and a photo gallery.
The site was built to be completely standards compliant and accessible.
Content was organized into PHP includes was built to be generated from a MySQL database.
We developed a Content Management System for the backend which allowed for secure updating of content and images.
Meta-content and body content were optimized so that search bots would likely rank the site high with user keyword searches.
Follow Up
The Queens decided to go another direction creatively with their website.
