Morphos / Work
Rathsallagh House
A country house hotel in County Wicklow whose business is weddings — and whose website was still answering the question guests had already moved past.
Rathsallagh has a clear advantage and an unclear website. The house, the grounds and the food are the wedding — and couples who book it are buying a day, not a room list. The old site answered the room-list question instead.
What we changed
The site was rebuilt around the sequence a couple actually goes through: is this the kind of place we want, can it hold our number, what does a day here look like, who do we talk to.
Four shifts
- From room list to wedding sequence — the wedding pages became a guided path rather than a section in a grid of facilities.
- Capacity stated plainly — the numbers a couple needs early (how many seated, how many for the evening) moved to where the decision is made, not to a PDF.
- Real days, not stock imagery — photography of actual weddings at the house replaced the generic reception shots that made it look like every other venue.
- One enquiry form that asks the right things — date, guest numbers and the couple's own short description, so the first reply can be specific rather than a brochure.
The build
Hand-written, fast on mobile — where nearly every couple looks first — with the venue's team able to update dates, photography and copy themselves. Nothing depends on a third-party page builder that could change its terms.
The result
The venue reports across the first wedding season after launch, compared with the season before.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Wedding enquiries per season | 58 | 96 |
| Enquiries that converted to a viewing | 34% | 51% |
| Time spent answering 'how many can you seat' by email | ~5 / week | ~1 / week |
| Viewings booked without a phone call first | 18% | 62% |
One season post-launch against the previous season. Enquiry and viewing records supplied by the venue.
Image and project shown with the property's permission. Commercial figures are the property's to publish, not ours.
What did the redesign involve?
Full rebuild of the site around a wedding-first structure, with the hotel and dining content kept but re-prioritised. Photography was re-selected from real weddings held at the house.
Did the existing search rankings survive?
Yes — existing URLs were kept where possible, metadata carried across, and anything that moved was redirected one-to-one rather than sent to the homepage.
Can the venue update it themselves?
Yes. Dates, photography and copy are editable by the in-house team. The layout does not depend on their making changes correctly.
What we would do differently
Two things, both about sequencing rather than design.
The photography should have been shot before the wireframes were signed off, not after. Working from an existing archive meant several sections were shaped around what existed rather than what the page needed, and one of them — the rooms — is still carried by fewer images than it deserves.
The second is the enquiry reply. The site was built to make enquiring easy, and it does, but the reply still goes out from a shared inbox during office hours. A confirmation screen and an automatic first response would have done more for conversion than the last two weeks of design polish, and they cost a fraction of it.
Both are the same lesson: the parts of a project that are not the website are usually where the next gain is. It is worth saying out loud at the start of a build, because it is much harder to raise after the invoice.