Armas Hotels

What it does

Armas is a resort group on the Turkish coast, and the site has one job ahead of every other: turn somebody who is looking at photographs into somebody who has picked a date. So the first thing over the hero is not a menu. It is check-in, check-out, guests and a search — with the phone number set underneath it, for the guests who would rather talk to somebody.

That bar comes back at the end of every room page, already scoped to the room being looked at. Nobody is sent to find their way back to a booking form, which is the step most hotel sites lose people on.

One card, three places

A room is a photograph, a name and a capacity. That card runs as a carousel on the home page, as a grid on the rooms index, and — opened — becomes a page with its own gallery, its own list of what is in the room and its own reservation band. The same three facts identify it in all three places, so a guest recognises the room they were looking at two screens ago.

Every other part of the property works the same way. The restaurants, the entertainment and the facilities are each a page with a breadcrumb rather than an anchor partway down a long home page. That is the difference between a property that can be found one restaurant at a time and one that can only be found as a whole.

Black, red, and photographs

The site owns two surfaces — a near-black and a single crimson — and lets the photography do the rest. Display type is a high-contrast serif, everything you actually read is a sans, and red is kept for the places where something happens: the search button, the reservation band, the tile behind a facility. A colour that means act here stops meaning it the moment it is also decoration.

The photography is the argument, so it is never cropped into a thumbnail when it can run the full width of the band instead.

Built to be entered from anywhere

A country selector sits in the header, beside the menu. Underneath it, the structure is one page per thing rather than one page per section — which is what lets a room, a restaurant or a spa be linked to, translated and arrived at directly, instead of being an anchor somebody has to scroll to find.