The iconic hotel asked us to build them a website to celebrate their restoration and $100 million renovation, bringing it back into modern vibrancy reflective of the city and spirit of the hotel. But technology has a way of moving faster and faster so we found ourselves rebuilding the site 5 years later.

Originally built using a drupal backbone, we upgraded to the more developer (and user) friendly WordPress platform. This allowed us to utilize pantheon, a hosting service specifically geared towards wordpress developers. Pantheon provides in place management, which means that they help us run the site. That saves both time and money mitigating the inevitable “site is down” emergencies. Since the drupal version of the site was nearing it’s ‘end of life’ for supporting the build, it also saved the hotel thousands of dollars trying to patch digital holes for an old technology.

WordPress also allows us to customize the admin, which means the hotel saves on operational resources by having internal staff make more changes more quickly.

It’s also optimized so that the website went from a dismal 1.5 seconds for first paint (the moment you see something on the screen) to a much faster .6 – yes those numbers are small but in the internet world, it’s akin to comparing a speed race in a pinto to a BMW. The page score also went up from 71% to a 93% which means that google will rank the site higher.

Lastly, we redesigned global UX elements and a number of pages to more fully reflect the current day experience at Boston Park Plaza so that the sense of place was maintained from booking on the website, to getting directions on the phone, to entering the majestic lobby awash in style and comfort.