Hotel 140

A hotel’s website is an extremely integral part of the business; in the present day and age it is the primary point of contact between the customer and the hotel. Essentially all reservations are made on a hotel’s website and an appealing, well-designed, fully functional website can be the difference between a thriving and failing business. I reviewed Hotel 140’s website, a boutique hotel in the Back Bay neighborhood in Boston, on various factors that holistically make a website great. By and large, the site performed mediocre. The site missed out completely on some important criteria that I reviewed it on, for example net and social media content. On the other hand, the site performed stronger when reviewed against Search Engine Friendliness, having shown up early in popular search engine results.

Website User Friendliness:

Overall on website user friendliness, Hotel 140’s website scored a 40 out of a possible 120 points (33%). The website scored two zeros, the first zero is because the website doesn’t incorporate the use of any rich media whatsoever. The other aspect in which it scored zero was in the virtual hotel brochure ordering. There is no option to order a virtual hotel brochure.

The other categories in which the website did extremely poorly in terms of user friendliness was “Area attractions information”, Information about companies in the area, foreign language(s) hotel description, self service tools and targets specific online audiences.

Area attractions information- Score: 1

On the home page there are 5 headers; About, Reservations, Location, Special Events, and Contact Us. Clicking on any one of these takes you to a page that contains, in essence, four drop down menus. Under the “location” drop down menu you can find neighborhood attractions. But once you click on this, the page contains no text in the body copy, only 3 images of the hotel on the right hand side of the page.

Therefore, while there is a page dedicated to area...