easy-breaks.com is one of the UK’s leading holiday companies, offering holidays at over 300 hotels throughout the country, with a selection of late availability holidays as well as themed and event-led breaks focused on activities, festive holidays and entertainment.

Creative State was approached to lead the website design process, research the competition and target market, as well as review current search engine optimisation reports to gain insight into how existing customers were using the site.

The overall objective was to deliver a new e-commerce website that ensured greater user experience, and highlighted the choice of available breaks in a clear and concise way. The website would also enable users to search for breaks through a number of channels.

In order to retain the flow of traffic from existing customers, as well as attract new visitors, we were asked to keep the original brand colour palette. The website itself was to be entirely redesigned to deliver a range of new features to enable users to book quickly and easily.

Particular emphasis was placed on signposting users to their area of interest in a clear and concise way. To facilitate this, visitors are presented with a search facility where they can search by break type, by hotel or by both. They can also use this function to display results on a Google map.

Visitors can also browse late deals and featured breaks, which can be adjusted to suit taste and budget, and each hotel has its own page where you can discover more about the location. Visitors can also manage breaks, view booking history and write reviews through their account.

The design has proved a great success and statistics have shown an immediate improvement in the way users interact with the website. The time users spend on the site has improved and sections such as late deals and featured breaks are more widely used.

Jonathan Ellis, Occupancy Marketing, commented "The time users spend on the site has improved and the number of users leaving the site has dropped. The most important trend is the shift in browsing patterns, with traffic to the offers and deals pages increasing many times over."