One accommodation website. Four houses, each sold on its own.

Phase 01Design direction

The client's strongest selling point isn't text. It's the view.

Severka is not an anonymous resort, and a sterile hotel template would have stripped out exactly what it stands on: solitude, timber, the meadow and mountain history. The visual direction came out of that — tradition meeting contemporary hospitality design, in muted natural tones that let the photograph carry rather than compete with it.

Deep forest green as the identity colour, warm cream as the ground, supporting tones of wood and earth. Serif headings carry the character, a clean sans handles operating information and the interface. And between them more empty space than the old site had on its entire homepage.

The main change isn't in the palette, though. It is in what the photograph is for: it stopped being decoration between paragraphs and became the thing that sells. We reset the hero text several times so that it covers neither the main cottage nor the ridgeline — here the hierarchy gave way to the image, not the other way round.

Phase 02Order

Emotion first. Information second.

The old homepage opened with a written message: heading, claim, phone number, paragraph. The redesign inverts that logic. First we want to show Severka, and only then explain it.

On this job that isn't an aesthetic decision. What is being marketed is not an abstract service that has to be described, but a specific place that only has to be shown. So the large-format photograph was given the whole first screen, and lines like “Mist over the meadow in the morning. Red skies over Sněžka in the evening.” were given room of their own instead of being buried inside a paragraph.

Legibility over the photograph is handled by shading and an overlay, not by a coloured band across half the screen. At the same time the total capacity of the enclave was unified into one number that holds everywhere.

A site that opens by explaining has to earn your attention. A site that opens with the place is given it.

Phase 03Four products

The question the site has to answer is: which cottage is mine?

The redesign changes the role of the individual buildings. A visitor no longer has to read four long descriptions and distil the differences out of them. They should quickly grasp which house matches their kind of stay — and only then start reading the description.

Severka is the main and largest building, with shared spaces and a restaurant serving half board. Kabinka is a smaller standalone cottage for four to six with a striking view. Větrník is a traditional timber lodge suited to larger groups. Na konci světa is a separate cottage with a high degree of privacy and a character of its own.

Above that sits a comparison built around “pick the right cottage in 20 seconds”: capacity, type of stay, half board, privacy. It isn't a table for the sake of a table — it is the one place on the site where the four products can honestly be set side by side.

Phase 04Conversion path

The most important change in this job isn't graphic. It's one verb.

The old site used generic contact wording — write to us, get in touch, contact us. The new site uses a more specific and psychologically far lighter action: “Check availability”.

The difference lies in what the visitor feels they are committing to. “Book” sounds like a commitment. “Write to us” sounds like a conversation you have to prepare for. “Check availability” is a question the visitor wants answered as much as the owner does — and it leads into exactly the same form.

The form has five steps: dates from and to, number of people, type of stay, preferred building with an “I don't know, advise me” option, and contact details. It sends a non-binding enquiry. There is no public availability calendar, because Severka really does book by arrangement — and a website shouldn't promise a process that isn't running behind it.

Micro-conversions instead of pressure: look, compare, check the price, check availability, send.

Phase 05Information architecture

We didn't start deleting information. We started layering it.

The client has a great deal of operating information that has to stay on the site — these are conditions, not filler. Cutting the long texts would not have solved the problem, only moved it: whatever disappears from the site gets asked over the phone.

The answer was to split the content into layers according to when a person needs it. Quick information on the main page, detail on the individual cottage's page, an FAQ for recurring questions, a price list for pricing and payment terms, documents for the full legal and operating wording.

Practical information also got a design system of its own: short cards of the same size, each with an icon, a heading and a few lines. The text was fitted to the component, not the component to an arbitrary length of text. The result is a regular grid you can scan with your eyes — and which stacks on a phone without anything falling apart.

Whoever wants the price doesn't have to read the cancellation terms on the way. Whoever wants the cancellation terms can still get to them.

The price list

The price list wasn't a page. It was an Excel sheet photographed into an image.

The old price list carried plenty of important detail: seasons, minimum length of stay, renting individual rooms, children, New Year's Eve, pets, deposits, arrival and cancellation terms. But the prices themselves were not written on that page. They were placed as four images — one Excel sheet photographed for each cottage.

The consequences of that are not aesthetic. No price could be selected, copied or found with an in-page search: not one of the figures appeared as text in the page source. A screen reader read nothing out of those tables. On a phone the image shrank to an illegible size and could only be enlarged by panning. And because an image isn't edited the way text is, Severka's table still showed the 2023–2024 season at a point when the site was offering stays in 2026.

In the redesign the price list broke down into components: a building switcher, season labels, a price table with a secondary per-person-per-night rate, and below it the notes that used to hang under the image as asterisks. The prices are text. They can be searched, they can be copied, a screen reader reads them and on a phone they wrap.

The price list stopped being a document you download with your eyes. It became a tool for deciding.

Content audit

A good website isn't only handsome. It heads off misunderstandings between guest and owner.

Assembling the FAQ meant going through every repeated piece of information and checking whether it said the same thing everywhere on the site. Often it did not. And these are not typos — they are the things that end in an argument on arrival.

Dogs are the clearest case. The rule is not one rule for the whole enclave: at Severka and Kabinka dogs are not allowed at all, at Větrník and Na konci světa they are possible by prior arrangement, when the whole building is booked, and for a surcharge. The general sentence “dogs by arrangement” is therefore untrue for half the enclave — and a guest who reads it and turns up at Severka with a dog is both right and wrong.

Capacities, half board, check-in and check-out, minimum length of stay and parking were reconciled the same way. Half board is a good example of how one small piece of information carries the credibility of the whole: it is served at Severka and is available to guests of every cottage. That single sentence has to appear identically in the price list, in the FAQ, in the practical information and on every building's page.

The cheapest mistake is the one you find while writing the FAQ. The most expensive is the one a guest finds in the car park.