Ariens Co Hospitality

UX Design | UX Strategy

AriensCo Hospitality hosts corporate events, special occasions, weddings and beyond. They offer a variety of beautiful venues and unique spaces.

The Situation

AriensCo Hospitality came to Northwoods in need of a new website to showcase its brand new venue spaces that were then under construction. The site needed to be beautifully designed to appeal to their target audiences.

The Solution

Northwoods first conducted a competitor analysis and developed a site map to help guide the AriensCo team on content development.

Before finalizing the website design, our team toured the new venue sites during the final stages of construction to make sure the design aligned well with the look and feel of the physical venues.

The Northwoods team understood how critical imagery would be to AriensCo Hospitality’s success and purposefully designed the site with a heavy emphasis on photography.

Filterable Gallery

The Northwoods team added a filterable gallery to showcase photography from past events in order to emphasize the beauty of the venues and easily imagine how their event could look.

Users are able to filter the image gallery by venue name and event type to view relevant imagery. For example, users can quickly find wedding photos at the Round Lake Farms venue, then scroll through the masonry grid of images or click to view the images at a larger size for a closer look.

A white border and subtle drop shadow were added to frame the images out, enhancing the site’s elegant tone and subtly bringing in the feel of old fashioned polaroid photos.

The Design

Imagery can make or break a website. Incorporating great imagery is an effective way to engage and appeal to users and set an overall tone, particularly for the hospitality industry. The AriensCo Hospitality site features large photos that are not only stunning but high-quality to make a great first and professional impression.

A light wooded texture is used as a background through the website to keep the focus on imagery (as shown above). The wooded texture also helps give the site a more modern feel and adds a bit of dimension to keep the design from becoming too flat.

Whitespace is another commonly used component in web design. Knowing where to use white space can make other elements such as imagery really stand out. It also helps guide the eye, add visual space between content blocks, and make the website feel organized and uncluttered.

The Outcome

With Northwoods’ direction on information architecture, content development, and imagery direction, AriensCo Hospitality now has all the tools they need to manage a successful hospitality website.