SilverSprings Apart Hotel

About SilverSprings

SilverSprings is a gorgeous town-house apartment hotel in the heart of Exeter. The main building has 5 luxurious self-catering apartments along with another 2 apartments next door. One of the things that makes SilverSprings unique is the ability to book a self-catering apartment from as little as one night, hence the term “Apartment Hotel”.
Particularly suited to business people but enjoyed just as much by tourists of the area.

Design

As with any business website these days, it is critical to make sure that the website is just as accessible to visitors on mobile phones and tablets as it is for users of desktop computers, so the site has a responsive design but retains a rich visual experience on any device.

We’re responsible for the photography on the site too. Juliet, the owner, dressed and prepared the suites and we shot them over 2 sessions. We’re pretty pleased with the results but will leave you to be the judge of our efforts.

Behind the scenes

SilverSprings has a complete administrative user interface for accepting or rejecting incoming enquiries and converting them to bookings, taking deposits and ultimately capturing the final bill from the customers’ credit card. Of course the back office is also capable of many other functions such as changing the tariff

History

We’ve worked with SilverSprings for a number of years (Around 8 or 9 perhaps) and have always enjoyed it very much. The most recent website is the third version but this time there’s much more to it than a basic hotel brochure site. The brand identity was created by Ikonika in Cornwall, old allies of ours but everything else is our work from the server side programming to front-end design.

Whilst the older websites always performed well and looked good, the new site also handles much more of the day to day business operations including management of apartment bookings and handling payment using the Stripe API.

More nerd stuff

The build is entirely bespoke and features integration with various APIs. We use Mandrill for transactional email messages such as booking receipts and confirmations. The MailChimp API is used for mailing lists and Stripe for secure payment processing. We used to be able to integrate TripAdvisor reviews by syndicating their XML feeds but when TripAdvisor dropped this feature we had to write a custom scraper to sift through the DOM on the review pages. We’ve open-sourced this module here.