As you previously know, Template Monster originally published a post entitled Ugliest Websites of World’s Top Hotels that caused a burst of comments both criticizing and encouraging. This fact couldn’t leave us indifferent, and consequently, we made Supersonic Redesign of the worst (in our opinion) hotel website – the website of the Hotel Goldener Baer in Vienna. For all that, we got even greater amount of feedbacks (many thanks for them), and what was truly exciting that one of the active participants of the dispute, mentioned above, drew a sketch depicting his own vision of a new design for Goldener Baer website. As we know, in any design, as well as in any web design, various approaches are possible. Thus and so, we invited Steven to complete his sketch and write a guest post on Template Monster’s blog to acquaint our readers with alternative (in relation to our) redesign variant.
It should be noted that our approach is in marked contrast to Steven’s. He initiated with logo and corporate style changes. We focused on a website, and intentionally didn’t make any logo modifications since it would have entailed the change of corporate style which is far expensive than simply website redesign. Through differential approaches, we cannot accede to Steven’s criticism of our variant, but we have concluded to leave the original text to let the readers decide whose approach and whose variant is better.
So gain a deep insight into what Steven Moseley has written:
“Although the original Hotel Goldener Baer website looks about 15 years outdated and poorly designed, it contains a visual language that speaks very directly to the “character” of the Hotel.
How so? The Goldener Baer is a historic structure – textural, rustic, quaint. Consequently, the hotel’s website is also very textural, rustic, and quaint – indeed, to a fault, but that’s beside the point. The site has “character”. We’ll get more into what that means later.
Although the Supersonic Redesign of the website is unarguably more professional and usable (vastly so), the character of the Gold Baer somehow got lost in translation.
The redesigned website no longer speaks a rustic, quaint language. Instead, it speaks a corporate language, with chamfered boxes, radiused corners on buttons, pastel green and blue colors, and soft gradients. The only real texture in the site is in the background, but it doesn’t “feel” old-world. Instead, it has the feeling of mid-20th century wallpaper (not the kind you put on your computer desktop – the kind you actually paste onto walls!) In the new site, the stone textures, gold highlights, and serif typography used in the old site are all gone – and along with them, all of the character that define the hotel.
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