Designing the Starwood Hotels corporate site was a real challenge because instead of talking to just guests like the other Starwood brand web sites, the corporate site needed to be able to talk to six different audiences – guests, investors, job seekers, meeting planners, travel professional and hotel developers.
Awards:
Web Awards – Best Corporate Website
Behance – Web Design Served
The solution required a modular design that would be customized for each audience and a design solution that could utilize that system to tell several different versions of the company’s story based on the audience.
SITE CONCEPT
A narrative by the numbers
The site design uses one structure that we could customize with different interactive modules, promos, and content. These interactive modules brought huge amounts of information up to the home page, told the story of Starwood to each audience in an engaging fashion, and allowed for us to easily swap out modules to tell different stories as the company evolves. The one constant across all of those modules was the use of a large number that anchored each of the modules and as you scrolled down the page, all of the numbers created a narrative to tell the story of the brand for the selected audience.
MODULAR DESIGN
1 site, 3 unique home pages
Designing the Starwood Hotels corporate site was a real challenge because instead of talking to just guests like the other Starwood brand websites, the corporate site needed to be able to talk to six different audiences – guests, investors, job seekers, meeting planners, travel professional and hotel developers. Each of these audiences would also arrive at the site wanting different information so we needed to create a structure that would allow the site to meet the needs of each audience but also easily change over time to tell the ever-evolving story of Starwood. The final design uses navigation that simply shows each of the six audiences to allow for quick self-selection with separate home pages for each audience.
Explore 9 brands in over 50 countries
Designing the Starwood Hotels corporate site was a real challenge because instead of talking to just guests like the other Starwood brand websites, the corporate site needed to be able to talk to six different audiences – guests, investors, job seekers, meeting planners, travel professional and hotel developers. Each of these audiences would also arrive at the site wanting different information so we needed to create a structure that would allow the site to meet the needs of each audience but also easily change over time to tell the ever-evolving story of Starwood. The final design uses navigation that simply shows each of the six audiences to allow for quick self-selection with separate home pages for each audience.
MOBILE-FIRST DESIGN
Works on any device
This was the first site that was designed to work equally well on desktop and on tablets. Type sizes are larger to make it easier to read on mobile devices and form fields, and navigation is larger to make it easier to use on tablets. Smartphones are served the mobile web version of the site which can be seen here.
