Sonesta Newsroom Website Redesign

Sonesta partnered with us to plan, design, and develop a new and improved Newsroom.Sonesta.com website.

Pursuing a challenging deadline, we had just over a month to deliver this end-to-end website redesign project. We worked closely with Sonesta’s PR team to understand their challenges and goals and to formulate a detailed plan for successful project delivery.

Check out the homepage, about page, and article redesigns, and read on the discover how we got there.

Sonesta’s PR team relies on the Newsroom website for news distribution and growing the brand’s visibility in the media. Before the redesign, they struggled with content management, convoluted user paths, and poor usability and UI.

• Rigid CMS: The CMS was inflexible and made it challenging for Sonesta’s PR team to efficiently upload, format, and promote website content.
• Unintuitive Navigation: The users, primarily media outlets and journalists, found it difficult to navigate through Sonesta’s extensive library of company and hotel news. With issues such as ghost hamburger menus and unscalable brand lists, it was impossible to find hotel news beyond brand-specific content searches.

• Outdated UI Design: In addition to the poor UX, the website’s UI design was outdated, cluttered, and no longer reflected Sonesta’s brand image.
• The Deadline: Sonesta’s PR team was looking forward to launching their new and improved website in time for an important campaign. We had five weeks to plan, design, receive approvals, develop, and launch the website.

As we pursued a challenging deadline, we focused on gathering a detailed project brief and developing a plan that would minimize risks during design and development.

We provided Sonesta’s PR team with:

• Tailored WordPress CMS Experience: We customized the WordPress CMS environment and capabilities to meet the requirements of Sonesta Newsroom’s content managers.
• Enriched Sitemap: To better serve media outlets and journalists, we added new content spaces to the website’s sitemap, providing a wealth of resources and insights for their coverage objectives.
• Streamlined Navigation: We optimized the website’s navigation so that users can effortlessly find and access all parts of the website.
• Enhanced Content Filtering Features: We upgraded the content filtering system to improve user experience even further and enable users to quickly browse the article inventory by brand, location, or news category.

Sonesta Newsroom now allows journalists to filter news by brand, topic, and location

• Modern and Clean UI: We revamped the user interface to align with Sonesta’s brand guidelines and provided it with a modern and visually appealing design that reflects the company’s identity.
• A Phased Approach: To launch the website in a month, we worked with Sonesta’s PR team to define the phase 1 requirements, i.e. the must-haves for a successful website launch. From there, we created a “launch and learn” plan to finesse the website in a couple of phases.

Last, but not least, we ensured that the website is fully responsive to allow journalists to access it on the go.