Case Study: Tucson Hospitality Inn
About the Client
Tucson Hospitality Inn is a hospitality house—a non-profit organization that provides affordable temporary lodging for families in medical need. Founded in 2004, it caters to adults visiting Tucson for medical treatment and to their caregivers. Tucson’s heart hospital and the well-regarded cancer treatment program at the University Medical Center make the city a destination for many seeking medical care, and the Inn provides a valuable service for these travelers.
You can view the rebuilt THI website at www.tucsonhospitalityinn.net.
The Challenge
Though nominally a website redesign, this project actually involved a complete tear-down and rebuild of THI’s online presence. A volunteer had created the original site in his spare time. He did the best that he could, but was unfamiliar with both common design principles and modern Web technology.
The Tucson Hospitality Inn courtyard (click to enlarge)
The Inn’s old site was a one-page affair, lengthy and difficult to easily skim for information. It gave visitors little idea of the organization’s mission, or of the passion with which volunteers and board members worked to make that vision a reality. The site offered no guidance to potential donors and little description of the Inn’s unique charm and uncommon amenities.
The few photos that appeared on the original site were small and somewhat fuzzy, failing to show the property to its best advantage. Finally, the pre-built template used for the site looked more fitting for a mid-1990s technology company than a hospitality house. The prefab nature of such templates also guaranteed that the site looked like dozens of others, robbing the organization of its individuality and preventing it from conveying any memorable brand impression.
THI’s leaders were aware of their site’s shortcomings. In one of our early meetings, General Manager Lou Tompkins told me, “The site is awful… terrible.” Zenscope Studio was tasked with remaking the Tucson Hospitality Inn website into something the organization could be proud of.
The Solution
Screenshot of the new home page (click to enlarge)
One of the most important parts of a site’s early planning stages is establishing the goals that the site must meet for the client. One of the initial meetings with Lou and Anne established the following goals for the Tucson Hospitality Inn site:
- Provide an informative, credible, and attractive online presence
- Clearly convey the Inn’s mission, and the ways in which it achieves that mission
- Answer some of the most common questions that people have about the Inn—where to find it, how it’s different than a hotel, what it’s like inside, etc.
- Solicit new donations and volunteers
- Offer a look at the people behind the organization by providing brief staff / volunteer biographies.
Friendly error messages keep visitors from getting lost (click to enlarge)
Early discussions about the design of the site divided the Inn’s online audience into three groups of visitors based on their most common telephone inquiries: potential guests, potential donors, and members of the press researching for a story. The completed site serves all three groups, providing all the most commonly-requested information about the Inn and delivering it in an attractive and user-friendly package.
The Results
Happy Visitors and a Satisfied Client
“We have received extremely positive feedback on the website,” says Lou, “especially comments on how easy it was to navigate and find relevant information.” When asked about the experience of working with Zenscope he replied, “Adam made the process extremely painless for us.”
An Award-Winning Website
A few months after its launch, Tucson Hospitality Inn’s new website won an award at the annual convention of the National Association of Hospital Hospitality Houses. In a field of almost two hundred contenders, the site that Zenscope Studio designed and developed took second place in the “best website” competition.
Project Summary
- Project Description
- Website redesign for a small non-profit organization
- Completion Date
- January 31, 2006
- Services
- Setup of Textpattern content management system (CMS)
- Website design
- Website development (Textpattern templates and PHP scripting)
- Photography
- Copywriting
- Search engine optimization and submission
- Setup of traffic analysis software