The Challenge
The Stafford London, an ongoing agency client relationship since 2016 (initially via digital advertising), wanted to separate their restaurant from the hotel’s website into its own standalone brand and SEO presence. This grew into a larger opportunity: rolling the same design system out across the wider portfolio, the Stafford Collection hub plus individual properties (at the time including Norma, The Game Bird, and Northcote), while solving two structural risks common to multi-property hotel groups: users losing track of which brand level (Collection versus individual property) they were on, and duplicating restaurant content across both the hotel site and the standalone restaurant site in a way that could dilute either’s SEO position.
The Outcome
The core design system remains live today across the Collection hub and The Stafford London’s site, substantially unchanged. The individual portfolio has evolved since the original project: Norma remains a standalone site and brand within the Collection, while The Game Bird has since been replaced as the hotel’s dining concept, ordinary commercial turnover at the property rather than a reflection on the original IA work. A client testimonial credits the ongoing relationship since 2016 with a 40%+ increase in website revenue; this platform became the long-term foundation that growth was built on, though that overall figure reflects the cumulative relationship (ongoing paid media, SEO and account management alongside this work) rather than a metric directly attributable to this contribution in isolation.
The Approach
Applied deep WordPress and WordPress Multisite architecture expertise to structure a shared design system and final UI mockups across the Collection’s family of sites, the Collection hub plus each individual property and restaurant site, built on a single underlying multisite platform. Resolved the duplicate-content risk by allocating restaurant content ownership deliberately between the hotel-facing site (for staying guests) and the standalone restaurant site (for restaurant-only diners) rather than mirroring it across both. Mitigated brand-versus-location disorientation through distinct branding and logos per property, a smaller risk here than it would be for a chain using uniform branding across locations.
