Status: Concept redesign

Real rates, dates first and the building’s own red sign

The Crossings is a 70-studio motel at 34th and Haven in Ocean City, with a kitchenette in every studio and a heated pool. We redesigned its website as a concept, around what a guest does first: pick dates and see what the stay costs.

Open the demoBooking is shown as a demo.

Place: Ocean City, NJ
Year: 2026
Services: Website, booking demo, rates and specials, Ocean City guide

The brief

This one is a concept. We redesigned the motel’s website to show what booking direct could look like, using the motel’s own rates, photos and words.

The site it would replace, on Wix, has no date search on the page, only a link to the booking engine. Specials aren’t explained until the rates page, and the terms sit in one dense block of small print. We set one bar: a first screen that holds up next to the big hotel chains.

What we built

01
Dates in the first screen
Check-in, check-out, adults and children sit under the headline on the home, rooms and rates pages. The search checks the house rules as you go: four guests per studio, children included, and three nights minimum from June 19 to August 22.
02
The real 2026 rates, set like the rate card
Every nightly rate and special comes from the motel’s own 2026 rates, from $145 to $315 a night. The rates page is laid out like the printed card: the specials first, then the season table for both studio sizes.
03
Prices that know the date
A rate shows only while it can still be booked. Now that the 2026 season is over, the home page says what the nightly rates ran and that 2027 rates aren’t posted yet.
04
An identity taken from the building
White clapboard, the blue of the doors for links and buttons, and the red of the rooftop sign used once, on Reserve. Headlines are set in Barlow, squared like the motel’s logo and the letters on the roof.
05
Only what’s confirmed
Facts that came from guest reviews, like the number of blocks to the beach, stay hidden until the owner confirms them. The reviews section appears only once real reviews are added.

Booking, shown as a demo

Reserve opens a booking flow inside the site: dates and guests, the four room types from the motel’s booking engine with their descriptions, the guest’s details and a confirmation. The price of the whole stay is worked out from the published season table, with weekend nights, extra guests and the weekend package specials.

Every step says it’s a demo. Nothing a guest types is sent, no card details are asked for, and the confirmation hands the same dates to the motel’s real booking engine. When a reservations system is connected, two functions change and the pages stay as they are.

The motel’s own photos

Every photo is the motel’s own, taken from its current site, color-graded to match and saved as AVIF and WebP in several sizes. Some originals are only 640 pixels wide, so the site never shows them larger than they can hold. A shot list names what’s still missing, like the pool at golden hour and the 34th Street beach at sunrise.

Where it stands

This is a concept. It runs at a demo address on our server, and the motel’s domain still shows its current site. Booking is a demo: no reservation is made and nothing is sent. An owner admin for rates, reviews and photos is built, but it isn’t switched on in the demo.

What we did

Design and development
Booking flow priced from the 2026 rates (demo)
Rates and specials set like the motel’s rate card
Ocean City guide: beach tags, the boardwalk and the year’s events
Color grading and sizing for the motel’s photos
A copy check for the house rules

Built with Next.js and Tailwind as a static site. The booking demo hands guests to the motel’s ASI booking engine with their dates filled in. Owner admin on Decap CMS (not active in the demo).

Next case