This exclusive resort resides in the Margaret River region of Australia’s beautiful South West. The Margaret River Resort features an English-style pub, large heated swimming pool with family spa, manicured gardens, bistro/restaurant, tennis court and a wine centre.

For this project, we had to first start at the brand level and create a corporate identity and logo. As you can see, we incorporated the subtle used of vine and grape imagery to cast a welcoming look and feel commensurate with a high-end vineyard. Various pages also feature visually compelling, artistically captured, Flash-based images of the resort that automatically scale to the full size of the user’s screen.

As the resort’s livelihood depends largely on guest bookings, we spent a significant amount of time and focus on developing a new, easy to use customised booking system based on a Joomla Content Management System. This DogHouse-developed application saves the resort a 10% booking charge typically associated with standard, hosted online booking systems. The system itself enables resort staff to easily update and manage content pages, galleries and room availability. Furthermore, this unique, streamlined booking process allows the resort to keep all information in-house, which was very important to The Margaret River Resortthis client.

Visitors to the site can view resort menus, peruse the extensive photo gallery, review resort amenities, and look at live room availability. Once visitors select a date and room, they can book and pay online via credit card using a secure custom gateway that generates an instant confirmation upon payment.

Since the site went live, the resort has seen a dramatic increase in online bookings.