Luxury website design | Creating an online world for a luxury destination

A carefully crafted luxury website design is key for brands wishing to appeal to a high-end audience.

Porto Montenegro is a waterfront community offering a state-of-the-art superyacht marina, an exclusive real estate portfolio, and a retail village containing the best shopping and dining experiences in the Adriatic region.

They needed the help of a digital transformation agency to:

• Reflect their growing proposition;
• Appeal to some of the most prestigious clientele in the world; and
• Communicate the core pillars of life in Porto Montenegro: the perfect place to Live, Work, Learn and Play.

If, like Porto Montenegro, you want to develop a luxury website design that brings your high end offering to life, here’s what to incorporate…

Luxury visitors expect a luxury experience. And this should be no different in the online world.

Because Porto Montenegro has such a large offering of facilities and venues, we had to ensure everything could be discovered easily.

We used insights from stakeholders, users and site analytics to craft an easy, pain free user flow with a clear and intuitive sitemap.

The navigation takes a stylish, full-page form that allows users to browse the first and second level pages and then navigate their way across the site via an ever-present breadcrumb menu.

Clear calls to action are present throughout the site, making it easy and painless for visitors to make enquiries and bookings at any point of the user journey.

Read more on best practice UX design here.

What does a luxury website design look like? For Porto Montenegro, it was about building an inspirational, immersive online world.

We worked closely with the branding team behind the concept to develop the digital visual language for the site.

We produced a website design that allowed Porto Montenegro’s stunning offering to shine with minimalist colours and large format image regions surrounded by ample white space.

A component driven approach to the website design allowed us to create flexible, reusable regions that can be customised to fit each area of the site. New pages can be easily created in the CMS and given their own look and feel.

Read more on our creative website design process here.

Using video content on your website increases time spent on your site by 88% AND makes your message more memorable – the average viewer remembers 95% of a message when it is watched compared to only 10% of content that is read.

So we used large format video which plays automatically as users arrive on the website, encouraging them to engage with the content and explore further. The video content helps visitors to imagine life as a ‘Portonian’ and living a ‘Life less ordinary’.

We also used subtle animations and transitions across the Porto Montenegro site to enhance the UI. This made it feel alive and luxurious with a hint of the unexpected. Just like the resort itself.

There are numerous benefits of developing blog content on your site:

• It can help build your brand
• It results in increased traffic from search engines
• It helps you build an engaged community
• It can generate organic leads for your business
• It gives you a heap of content to repurpose across your marketing channels.

We worked closely with the Porto Montenegro team to create dynamic content hubs on the website – all designed to promote this vibrant waterfront community. The aim was to promote Porto Montenegro as a destination for everyone to enjoy ‘a life less ordinary’ – from real estate to sporting activities and musical entertainment.

Take a look at some of Porto Montenegro’s blog content streams here:

• Blog: interesting content around Montenegro as a destination, the marina, real estate and retail.
• See & Do: promoting events, attractions, activities and interesting information about the local area
• Shop & Dine: An intuitive directory promoting brands in the retail village

When thinking about a digital transformation for your luxury brand, make sure you:

• Follow UX best practices to ensure a smooth user experience and drive enquiries / bookings
• Use video to enhance the UI and encourage your users to engage with your website
• Develop an engaging content strategy to help build your brand / generate brand awareness

Propeller is a digital transformation agency specialising in designing and developing websites for brands in the luxury travel and lifestyle sector (see our work here). If you’d like to discuss how we can help you build a luxury website design that appeals to a high-end audience, get in touch.