- User Account Dashboard UX Design
- User Account Activity UX Design
- Notifications Experience UX Design
- Fios Navigation Frontend Development
- Save Brass Web Development
- Fios Design System Frontend Development
- Life on Fios Frontend Development
- Outfit Barn Web Development
- Dog and Meow Web Development
- Waist Shaper Co Web Design
- Monterey Web Development
- Daily Kix Web Development
- Fashionallo Web Development
- Athena Web Development
- Searchona Web Development
- InkHotels Web Design
Design and Development
InkHotels
01 Background
Travel booking is a space dominated by large platforms with years of supplier relationships, negotiated rates, and proprietary inventory. Building a competitive product from scratch against Expedia or Booking.com without any of that infrastructure would be an enormous undertaking. But the same insight that made Searchona possible applied here: you do not need to own the inventory to build a compelling experience on top of it.
Priceline’s Partner Network gave us access to real, live inventory across hotels, flights, and car rentals through a single API. That meant InkHotels could offer genuine booking capability from day one without needing to build supplier relationships or manage any inventory directly. The platform’s job was the experience: the design, the search, the presentation, and the path from discovery to confirmed reservation.
Company
InkHotels, LLC
Timeline
7 months (2013–2014)
Role
Full Stack Developer
Platforms
Desktop Web, Mobile Web
Stack
HTML, Javascript, JQuery, CSS, PHP, API
Tools
VS Code, Sketchapp, Invision, Adobe Photoshop, Github
02 Idea
A cleaner booking experience on top of proven infrastructure.
The major online travel agencies had become cluttered over time. Years of feature additions, upsells, pop-ups, and urgency tactics had made the booking experience on most platforms feel overwhelming rather than helpful. There was a real opportunity to offer the same inventory through a cleaner, more considered interface that respected the customer’s attention rather than assaulting it.
InkHotels was built around that idea. Hotels, flights, car rentals, and bundled packages all in one place, with a homepage and search experience designed to feel modern and trustworthy rather than transactional and pressured. SEO was a core part of the strategy from the start: organic search traffic from people actively looking to book travel was the most valuable audience, and the homepage was designed and optimized with that in mind.
Inventory
Hotels, flights, cars, and bundles
Full travel booking capability powered by Priceline's Partner Network, covering all major travel categories through a single integrated platform.
Design
Homepage designed for conversion
A clean, modern homepage built to communicate trust quickly and move visitors toward a search or booking action without unnecessary friction or clutter.
SEO
Optimized for organic search
The homepage and site structure were built with search engine visibility as a primary goal, targeting travelers actively searching for bookings rather than relying on paid acquisition.
Model
Affiliate revenue through Priceline
Every completed booking generated a commission through the Priceline Partner Network, creating a direct and scalable revenue model tied to the platform's core function.
03 Solution
A travel brand that felt built to be trusted.
The homepage was the most important surface to get right. For a new travel brand with no existing reputation, the homepage had about three seconds to communicate that this was a legitimate, trustworthy place to book a trip. The design prioritized clarity and credibility: a clean visual hierarchy, a prominent and functional search experience, and a layout that felt considered rather than assembled.
SEO was treated as a design constraint, not an afterthought. Page structure, heading hierarchy, content organization, and metadata were all built with search visibility in mind from the first version. Travel search is highly competitive, but the right technical foundation and content approach created a path to organic visibility that paid acquisition alone could not have achieved at the same cost.
The Priceline integration handled the heavy lifting on inventory and transactions. InkHotels presented the search interface and the booking flow in its own design language, while Priceline’s infrastructure handled availability, pricing, and reservation processing behind it. The result was a platform that functioned like a fully independent travel site while being underpinned by one of the most reliable travel inventory networks in the industry.
04 My role
Designed, built, and taken to acquisition.
I designed and developed InkHotels from the ground up. That included the brand identity, the homepage design, the site architecture, the Priceline Partner Network integration, and the SEO foundation. Working solo meant every decision about what the platform looked like, how it was structured, and how it positioned itself in a competitive market was mine to make.
The SEO work was as much a design challenge as a technical one. Getting a new travel site to rank for competitive search terms required building a site that search engines could read clearly and that gave users something genuinely worth landing on. The homepage had to serve two audiences simultaneously: a human visitor who needed to trust the site quickly, and a search crawler that needed to understand what the site was about just as fast.
The acquisition was the clearest signal that the product had reached something real. The domain and the asset had become valuable enough for someone else to want to own them. That is a good outcome for a solo project built on a lean infrastructure and a focused idea.