TORONTO—For Len Senater, partner with Toronto-based design firm Hypenotic and his team, working on the redesign of the Gladstone Hotel website was a labour of love. “The Gladstone Hotel has always been one of my favourite venues in Toronto,” he says. “It is right around the corner from our studio so it has always been our default lunch-meeting place.”

















































His issues with the hotel’s website was that it was static, time consuming and out of date. Senater worked on the project along with art director Sonya Barnett, tech lead Jorge Villalobos and partner Barry Martin. Gladstone Hotel president Christina Zeidler says the old site had been up for about six years and was not a priority when it was first created. “We did that strategically because we didn’t want to spend money on the website,” she says. “We wanted it to be an easy to read, access HTML site as we were building our content and our company.”

Zeidler says that working with Hypenotic was a natural fit for the redesign because of the team’s familiarity with the hotel. They had a lot of ideas on how the site should look. “Being so familiar with our product, they knew what our aesthetics were,” she says. “The hotel itself is very aesthetic with beautifully designed hotel rooms. They understand who we are, what we do and were able to be creative within that.”

One of the most interesting aspects of the project was how the information was gathered to begin the redesign. “We did a very in-depth collaborative research session with the Gladstone,” says Senater. “We brought a lot of their staff together and extracted insights from them that drove the new site. I think that led to a site that they are really happy with.”

Keeping with the historical aspects of the hotel was vital to the design, says Senater. “I think the new site captures the spirit of the experience of going into a building that is old, the details, the architecture,” he says. “We wanted to make sure that the values the hotel believes in became part of the design and the content. So it is as much about what they believe in as the products and services themselves.”

In addition to design additions including a graphic of the hotel which lights up depending on the visitors area of interest, three significant changes were made from the old to new Gladstone sites, says Senater. The first was moving from a static site to a content management system, which allows the site to be accessed by more than one web-savvy employee at the hotel.

Second was bringing dynamic search capabilities to the more than 100 event listings the Gladstone hosts each month. “Now users can search by title and date,” he says. “Before they just had one long page of events.”

Lastly they added online bookings, a feature that Senater says will become more enhanced in the months to come. Contact: Gladstonehotel.com, Hypenotic.com