Following a strategic review, Inovica produced a plan for the
development of each website within the group. Rather than taking the approach of developing fifteen
different websites, plus a main Group website, Inovica suggested the creation
of a template-based “Sitebuilder” that would enable the appropriate staff to
automatically generate a new website for each hotel. As the Cairn Hotel Group still had acquisition and expansion
plans, it was decided that this route would not only provide the consistency
necessary for the sites, but would also provide a cost-effective mechanism for
adding new hotels as they were brought into the Group.
Inovica created a completely new design for the core Group website
that was also flexible enough to work with the individual hotels branding, that
was being retained. This Group website acts as a portal site to each of the
individual hotels through its directory and also provides a central
availability and booking mechanism.
The sophisticated Sitebuilder system that Inovica developed has
proved to be a very successful element to this project. Using this system,
appropriate staff members can literally generate a new website, requiring no
programming or design skills. Each hotel website comes complete with a booking
system, hotel information, special offer area, location information and virtual
tour area. The content management for each hotel can either be managed
centrally or via local control by hotel management.
From a technical level, each site is fully database-driven,
includes a sophisticated content management system that can be used by all
staff with minimal training and is run on parallel, mirrored servers, located
in different geographical areas to ensure 100% uptime.
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