Atomised: the Web Design Co-operative

The Project

The Elgin Hotel & Restaurants is a Country House Hotel situated in the heritage village of Charlestown in Fife. Built in 1911, it has a gorgeous situation with views out over the River Forth to the Forth Bridges & Edinburgh on one side and of the planned village of Charlestown on the other (built by the 5th Earl of Elgin - Grandfather of The Elgin Marbles' Earl). The Elgin Hotel & Restaurants are owned and run by Rob Wemyss who has run the hotel for many years.

Keen to boost his web presence and begin online marketing and booking through his own site, Rob approached Atomised. The Elgin Hotel had had a website for a number of years but all were agreed that it did not sell the Hotel in any favourable light. Rob gave us some requirements and we got stuck in to it. Looking at The Elgin's signeage and brochures it was clear that many different versions of the Elgin logo existed and we felt none suited the business. We got to work at rebranding the business settling on retaining the Elgin's traditional red as a background but ditching the gold lettering in favour of white. After literally trying over a thousand fonts we settled on Adobe's Trajan Pro (a traditional serif font which although chosen for rightness is actually based on type found in classical antiquity - perfect for a Hotel so connected with The Elgin Marbles!) as the basis for the new logo and did two versions: one with the full name of the hotel and one a solitary 'E' (which can be seen in the bookmark icon).

With the brand and colour scheme sorted out we knew the next crucial piece of content needed to really sell The Elgin Hotel to the world at large was great photographs. The Hotel is gorgeous and it's location stunning and the old site hardly had any photos and even had a stock image! Rob had commissioned David Cruickshanks to take some photographs and Jill Moffat had taken some photographs too but numerically most of the photographs on the site were taken by Lorraine Smith on a scorching day in July. With a great brand and great photos we began the design of the site.

The aim was to make navigation as simple as possible while making the images centre-stage. Although there is a gallery section with a huge number of photographs to browse - each page represents a different aspect of the business and the building. So each page comprises a carefully selected photograph or photographs to take the user as close to being in the Hotel as possible. From experience we know that Rob's desire for advance bookings wouldn't happen unless the customer was happy with what they were getting. Our aim was to give the user as much of a true sense of the Hotel, it's facilities and surroundings as possible.