La Belle Étoile

The client

Hôtel La Belle Étoile & Spa is a boutique hotel in Saly, Senegal, with rooms with private jacuzzis, a spa, excursions and a restaurant serving European cuisine with Senegalese flavours. Its old website ran on a stock Odoo theme.

What was wrong

• A saturated violet-to-pink gradient hero, no strong photo above the fold, and a lot of centred text.
• Guest reviews shown as 17 screenshots from the Booking extranet: unreadable on mobile, invisible to search, and showing guests' booking numbers.
• Navigation that jumped to an odoo.com subdomain, a Contact page missing from the menu, and no page for the rooms.
• Booking buttons lost in the text, with no quick way to book on mobile.
• Mixed messages: the home page said the restaurant was closed while its own page listed opening hours.
• No alt text, weak contrast and no skip link, plus a default favicon and a “Generated by Odoo” footer.

What I designed

• The whole site, from the landing page to every inner page: rooms, restaurant, spa, excursions, gallery, the anniversary package and contact.
• A quiet editorial look that lets the hotel's real photos lead: ivory backgrounds, fine rules, matte gold and charcoal.
• The brand anchors kept: the copper star from the original logo and the espresso brown of the old theme.
• Cormorant Garamond headings with a gold italic keyword, and Jost for text and navigation.
• A dedicated Rooms page, and reviews rewritten as real text in a carousel.

What I built

• A static multi-page site in Astro that keeps every original URL, so existing links and search results still work, plus a custom 404 page.
• Booking everywhere: the hotel's booking engine is one tap away from the header, hero, room cards, rooms page, package, gallery, footer and a sticky mobile bar with call, WhatsApp and book.
• A contact form with clear field-by-field validation and spam protection; without a form service it opens the visitor's email or WhatsApp with the message ready.
• An accessible mega-menu on desktop and a full-screen mobile menu with focus trapping and Escape to close.
• A filterable gallery with a full-screen viewer (keyboard and swipe), and a map that loads only when asked.
• Responsive layouts from phone to desktop, optimised responsive images, self-hosted fonts and all content managed from data files.

Outcome

A complete redesign and build that carries over all the original content, including the full restaurant menu, the spa treatments, 16 excursions and the anniversary package. It ships no client-side framework and makes no third-party requests on load.