ACCESS

The Access site must reflect the brand image of the hotels and restaurants offered. Their luxury positioning. We need to envision an immersive site that makes one want to travel to these dream locations. The world of luxury is a demanding universe. The site must first be beautiful, but that's not enough. The premium impression that emanates comes from a set of elements that are all equally important: design, browsing experience, quality of content, loading speed, and smooth animations. Gaetan, our creative director, is working to combine all these parameters.

"Know-how, design, seriousness, meeting deadlines. In digital, it's rare to come across an agency like 148 Agence Collective."

Richard, Founding President, Access

In a site like that of Access, the quality of photos is paramount. They are what provide the first glimpse of the experience the client will have if they decide to make a reservation. But beautiful photos are often heavy formats. And for an island like Saint Barth, where the quality of networks is far from what one might know in France, there is a real challenge of performance and speed of execution. Our developers are therefore developing an intelligent image optimization system. With both the technology of "lazy loading," which allows only the visible images on the screen to be downloaded, and the use of the latest innovations in terms of compression, the WebP format, which surpasses jpeg or png standards.

Another difficulty with Richard's expectations. The amount of content he wants to integrate into his website. First, the establishments listed by Access are numerous. They must be categorized by city, and each must have its dedicated page. It is also necessary to include a Magazine section, with news articles about the latest openings and local cultural life. Thus, we are doing a lot of work on UX design to optimize the user experience. The segmentation of the site by cities, then by type of establishments, combined with the implementation of filters, allows the user to easily find their way around.

"Our role is to understand the client's needs and translate them into terms of ergonomics, design, and functionalities."

Mathias, Technical Director and co-founder, 148 Agence Collective 

This structure, which aims to simplify the user journey, is key to client acquisition. We add several practical features such as map search, which allows users to view an establishment in relation to a position and indicates the distance to reach it. There are also color dots to immediately see if a restaurant is open or closed.

In his business model, Richard faces a double commercial challenge. The clients of Access are both the end customers who will make a reservation on the site and the establishments that pay to be listed. The site must therefore integrate this dual dimension by becoming an advertising agency, with a reporting feature. Specifically, Access must be able to send each of the establishments the number of views, clicks, and reservations. Some hotels are willing to pay more to appear higher on a page, but they need guarantees about this visibility.

"The luxury establishments listed with us are very satisfied with this new site, its ease of use and its speed of execution."

Richard, Founder President, Access

The establishments must also maintain autonomy in managing their page and be able to update their information directly. Therefore, we are developing a specific feature through which Access sends a link to each of the listed establishments so they can directly modify their description, contact information, prices or opening hours, for example.

Many clients visit the Access site on their mobile devices. The website is therefore designed with a mobile first approach. The pages are optimized for smartphones and tablets. Furthermore, we are creating an application, available on Android and iPhone. From the mockup phase, we integrate this thinking about the application. We are developing the site as a PWA (Progressive Web App) so that the mobile version of the site can easily adapt to an application. Today, Richard therefore has at his disposal a 3-in-1 tool: web, mobile, and application.