[ client ]
THE REVEL STAY
[ industry ]
Boutique Travel Guide
[ services ]
- Website Redesign
- Brand-Aligned UI Design
- Custom CMS Architecture (WordPress, Elementor, JetEngine)
- Content System & Template Design
- Site Migration
[ role ]
Redesign, Site Architecture & CMS Development
[ the brief ]
Doug found me on Pinterest through a viral concept travel website design that I made, "The late checkout". He had build his own travel guide website in Elementor but needed a designer to structure the site and give it a face-lift. He was looking for a similar editorial, nostalgia-led feel brought to life for The Revel Stay.
What began as a visual redesign quickly surfaced a deeper problem: the site had been built manually page by page. Every new destination meant duplicating structure from scratch, with no system underneath to hold it together. To grow the way Doug wanted — more cities, more neighbourhoods, more hotels — the site needed more than a new look. It needed a foundation that could scale with it.
[ the approach ]
The redesign carried over the same warm, editorial language from the original concept piece — soft, reddish serif headlines combined with handwritten notes and generous white space, paired with his carefully selected vintage-feel photography.
Bringing that design to a real, growing travel brand also meant building the system underneath it from the ground up: a custom WordPress and JetEngine architecture where cities, neighbourhoods, hotels, restaurants, and category guides are all built from shared, dynamic templates rather than one-off pages. Add a new destination, tag it correctly, and it inherits the full design — hero, neighbourhood grid, filterable directories, cross-linked "explore more" sections — automatically. What started as a design refresh became a full site migration and CMS build, executed end to end.
[ the outcome ]
The Revel Stay now runs as a genuine content system, not a stack of individually built pages. Doug can now add a new city or journal entry himself and watch it inherit the complete design and structure instantly. The site has scaled from a single destination to a growing, multi-city travel guide, with the same editorial feel that first caught Doug's eye now holding true across every page it touches.
