Building solid corporate sites on WordPress.
We completely rebuild the Travelodge corporate site to be easier to manage
What did Travelodge need?
Travelodge is a large UK hotel brand operating as a public company. This is not their booking site. It is their corporate presence – the platform they present to investors, journalists and property developers.
Corporate websites for public companies serve a specific and serious purpose. Investors need clear, well-organised financial and governance information. Journalists need press releases, assets and contact routes. Property developers need to understand the business and how to engage it. None of those audiences are browsing casually – they are arriving with a purpose and expecting to find what they need quickly and professionally presented.
The existing site needed moving to WordPress and its design refreshing. The brief was not complicated: a visually strong, brand-led site that communicates corporate information clearly, is reliable, and can be maintained internally without developer involvement for routine updates.
This was a design-first project. Layout concepts and page templates were developed before final content was in place, allowing stakeholders to sign off on structure and visual direction while copy was being finalised.
What the site needed to do:
- Present corporate information clearly and professionally to investors, journalists and property developers
- Reflect Travelodge’s brand identity with consistency across all page templates
- Handle press releases, galleries, PDFs and embedded video content in a structured and manageable way
- Give the internal team control over routine updates without developer dependency
- Be reliable, simple and easy to maintain – this site does not need complexity
Our approach
Project overview
A bespoke WordPress build for the corporate investor relations site of a major UK hotel brand. Design-first approach – layout concepts and templates developed before content was finalised. Brand-led, clean and professional throughout.
Design
- Design-first approach – layout concepts and page templates developed before final content was in place
- Placeholder content and imagery used during design phase so stakeholders could sign off structure and hierarchy without waiting for copy
- Existing brand guidelines – logo, typography and colour palette – followed throughout
- Clean, corporate feel appropriate for investor, media and property developer audiences
Content and structure
- Site structure follows an agreed sitemap defined at project outset
- Existing content carried over and refined throughout the build
- Corporate pages, press releases, galleries, PDFs and embedded video all supported and consistently templated
- Navigation clear and direct – audiences arrive with a purpose and the site gets out of their way
WordPress build
Bespoke build on our own custom starter theme. Purpose-built ACF content blocks give the internal communications team full control over corporate pages, press releases and asset management without developer involvement. The site is built to be maintained by a small team without fuss – which is exactly what a corporate IR site requires.
Technical foundations
Analytics, tag management and existing integrations all supported. Accessibility considered throughout with the aim of best-in-class standards. Search performance is not the primary objective for this site – but the technical foundations follow best practice regardless, because the right way to build is the right way to build.
A corporate or investor relations site?
If you need a professional, brand-led website that a small internal team can manage independently – without unnecessary complexity – we should talk.
Tell us what you need and we will build it properly.
The results
97/100
Google PageSpeed score on mobile and desktop at launch
Brand-led
Existing brand identity applied consistently across all templates – appropriate for investor and media audiences
100%
Of content manageable by the internal team – press releases, corporate pages and assets updated without developer involvement
Nada
Unnecessary complexity – a corporate IR site should be clean, reliable and easy to operate
Reliable
A properly built WordPress site on good foundations – stable, maintainable and ready for future updates
Accessible
Best-in-class accessibility standards applied throughout – a public company website should meet the highest bar
Technical details
WordPress theme
Built on our own bare-bones WordPress starter theme. No inherited styles, no third-party framework dependencies, no bloat. Before any design work goes in, we run the blank theme through Google PageSpeed Insights and aim for 100 out of 100 on both mobile and desktop. That discipline applies to every project, including corporate sites where search is not the primary driver.
Plugins
We keep third-party plugins to a minimum. This site uses ACF-powered content blocks edited in the Gutenberg editor. The default WordPress block library was disabled entirely – editors can only use the purpose-built blocks we created, which means every page is built consistently and on-brand regardless of who published it.
Integrations
Analytics and tag management configured and working at launch. Existing integrations carried across without disruption. For a public company website, having accurate analytics in place is not optional – boards and communications teams need to know what is happening on the site.
Accessibility
Accessibility considered throughout with the aim of best-in-class standards. Semantic HTML, keyboard navigability and contrast standards applied across all templates. A public company has a broad and varied audience – the site needs to be usable by all of them.
Why WordPress was the right platform for Travelodge’s corporate site.
Corporate IR sites have the opposite problem to most websites. The issue is not getting people there – it is making sure the experience is impeccable when they arrive.
An investor landing on a corporate website has already decided to look. A journalist researching a story has already decided to investigate. A property developer considering a partnership has already identified Travelodge as relevant. The website does not need to attract these people. It needs to not let them down.
That changes the requirements significantly. SEO, conversion funnels, lead generation – none of those are the point. The point is clarity, reliability, brand consistency and the ability to keep the site current without it becoming a burden on the internal communications team.
WordPress delivers all of that cleanly. The ACF block system means press releases can be published, galleries updated and corporate documents added by whoever is responsible for them – without developer involvement and without risk of breaking the layout. The platform is stable and well understood, which matters for a company that needs its corporate site to simply work.
The design-first approach we took here also suits the corporate context well. Getting structure and visual hierarchy signed off before content is finalised means the stakeholder approval process runs more smoothly – no one is trying to judge a page template while simultaneously reviewing copy. The result is a site that is exactly what it needs to be: nothing more, nothing less.
