The Edward Hotel — David Le

Overview

The Edward Hotel reached out through a referral to redesign their Wix site — an informational portal where guests browse rooms and book online. I took the project end to end as designer and developer, working with the client and a content writer to launch within three weeks.

The problem

The existing site did not feel modern or professional enough for a boutique hotel with strong interior design credentials. Beyond surface aesthetics, the problems ran deeper:

Typography and color choices made content hard to read and eroded trust.
Photography — one of the hotel’s best assets — was underused.
Users were pushed to a third-party booking site before learning anything about the property.
Wix’s builder added load-time and SEO friction that made the experience feel dated.

The Edward Hotel website before the redesign — Fig 01 — The previous Wix site before the redesign.

Before & after

The redesign replaced the dated layout with a photography-forward experience, a clearer hierarchy, and brand-new visual language built from scratch.

The Edward Hotel website after the redesign — Fig 02 — The shipped redesign with updated typography, color, and layout.

Reframing the experience

The hotel had a real story to design from: an E.B. Green mansion built in 1910 on Buffalo’s “Millionaire’s Row,” restored in 2019 into a boutique hotel. The old site never told it. The new brand leads with it — the hero reads “History Meets Modern Luxury,” and every visual choice backs that claim.

With no existing brand guidelines, I built a new visual language from scratch: Lora for editorial elegance, Noto Sans for interactive UI, and a sharp gold accent on dark backgrounds that reflected the hotel’s luxurious, historical character.

Information architecture came first. I mapped the old user flow and cut what did not earn its place — the empty Explore page became a Gallery, Contact moved to a persistent footer component, and Private Events condensed into a homepage module. Booking stayed one click away in the nav, but room discovery now happened on-site first.

User flow diagram comparing the old and new Edward Hotel site structure — Fig 03 — Restructured navigation around discovery before conversion.

Edward Hotel visual design system showing typography, color, and form language — Fig 04 — Logo, typography, color, and form language for the new brand.

Building for performance

The site is photography-heavy, so a static HTML approach would have been slow to build and slow to load. I chose Gatsby for React’s component model, image processing through Sharp, and static output without a CMS overhead.

Key additions:

A Find Room component that keeps date browsing on the hotel site — a check-in/check-out range picker in the hero that builds the third-party booking URL from the selected dates, so guests only leave the site at the moment of payment. It also carries the hotel’s contact-free pitch: “Book 100% online. Check in and out, contact free.”
A Rooms page with optimized carousels, lazy-loaded images, and full control over amenities and copy before handoff to the booking provider.
A Gallery page with lightbox browsing across the client’s existing professional photography.

Find Room component on The Edward Hotel website — Fig 05 — Find Room component keeping search on the hotel site before booking handoff.

The live Edward Hotel homepage with the check-in and check-out range calendar open in the hero booking widget — Fig 06 — Live on the site today: the hero range picker that hands off to the booking provider with dates pre-filled.

Rooms page with image carousel on The Edward Hotel website — Fig 07 — Rooms page with high-quality photography and full amenity control.

Gallery page showcasing hotel photography — Fig 08 — New Gallery page showcasing the client's professional photography.

Gallery lightbox with a full-size room photo, filmstrip of thumbnails, and slideshow controls — Fig 09 — The gallery lightbox: full-size browsing with a filmstrip, slideshow, and fullscreen mode.

Edward Hotel homepage portal navigation — Fig 10 — Homepage redesigned as a visual portal to key destinations.

Selling the stay, not just the room

A boutique hotel’s pitch is bigger than its beds, so the site sells the spaces around them too. The Amenities page gives each space — the Roosevelt Tea Room, the Solarium — an editorial treatment: a name, a short piece of storytelling, and a pair of full-bleed photographs, rather than the usual icon list of checkboxes. The Private Events offering got the same respect on the homepage: capacity, hourly rate, and fees presented plainly in styled stat tiles, with inquiries routed to the persistent contact form.

The Amenities page presenting the Roosevelt Tea Room with editorial copy and paired interior photography — Fig 11 — Amenities as editorial: the Roosevelt Tea Room with storytelling copy and paired photography.

The outcome

The client approved the first design iteration. The Rooms page in particular solved their core complaint: guests could finally see what the hotel offered before leaving for the booking flow. The rebuild also brought a mobile experience the old site never had — navigation, booking, and room browsing all work on small screens.

Mobile responsive layouts for The Edward Hotel website — Fig 12 — Mobile layouts for booking, rooms, and navigation.

The live mobile site: the hero booking widget, and the dropdown navigation menu open — Fig 13 — The live mobile site today: hero booking widget and the dropdown navigation.

The best measure, though, is durability: years after launch, the site is still running unchanged at theedwardbuffalo.com — the brand, layout, and booking flow have held up without a designer on call.

Reflection

This project reinforced that “make it modern” is never just a visual brief. The hotel’s version of modern had to honor classical interiors while feeling crisp in a digital context — and the biggest wins came from restructuring the journey, not from swapping typefaces alone.