Been involved with The Miami Hotel in West Melbourne for some time now – providing web design fixes and custom css, copy writing, SEO, and site/attractions photography in conjunction with allThoseShapes.
Took photos of the Miami Hotel rooms and features…
…inner Melbourne tourist attractions:
The Melbourne Street Art scene is spread through out the city and suburbs creating life to often unusual and unused spaces.
There is a following for this movement that stems far and wide, moves quickly and is image brilliant.
Many artists are sought after and commissioned for works and some of Melbourne’s Lane ways are almost transformed daily.
Below Left (Miami Hotel Melbourne by artist @CTOart)
Below Right Various examples around Melbourne
Street Art is very important to Melbourne and The Miami Hotel and is a major tourist attraction in Melbourne for many years now.
In accordance with our passion for street art we have employed world-renowned street artist CTO to paint the exterior and interior of our hotel and to give street art workshops including how to pray paint, use various caps and make your own stencil.
The Miami Hotel is located very close to the North Melbourne Street Art precinct where you will find art by TuYuLoveMe, Cam Scale, Asio Art, “banana peel”, Drew Funk, Kaffeine, Burg, Lush and more.
When you stay with us you are also super close to Blender studios (also in West Melbourne), ‘Lovelands’ and the old Blender Lane near the Vic Market, The Upper West Side Street Arts Precinct featuring Smug Rone Adnate, and are close to all the famous Melbourne laneways including Union Lane, Hosier and Rutledge Lanes, ACDC lane and Duckboard place, Drewery Place, Higson Lane, Little bourke St, Flanigan & Guildford Lanes…
To book your Group Street Art Workshop with CTO please contact Kelly – bdm@themiami.com.au – if you dont have your room at The Miami yet, please visit our rooms page to make your choice, or contact us desk@themiami.com.au.
Miami Hotel uses Siteminder CMS – a CMS designed around booking functionality – which it excels at. Styling wise, image and SEO-wise though, it is quite terrible in spots.
Siteminder comes with four rigid template options. Trying to copy HTML, javascript etc from one template to another does not work – so you have to chose and stay with one template only – Siteminder will not allow you to modify or add to (as you may be used to with wordpress) any part of the HTML structure.
You can choose the excellent-for-attractions-page theme Ally:
or the stuck-in-2003 HTML list style Paul Rudd theme attractions page:
Being that the Attractions page is a main feature for The Miami Hotel – Ally theme was chosen when for the most part the Paul Rudd theme is better over all. An inevitable (at this stage) compromise.
You cant over-ride the styles applied to the home-page slider alone (for example) – the same div names .swiper-wrapper, .swiper-slide and .card-image are used to wrap the room images, gallery and attractions images, even the youtube video so they all stretch too! And theres more:
1. SEO for the pages is standard – for the attractions ‘pages’ though – non-existent – there is no link to “hosier lane street art” for example – as there is no post or page for it.
2. Recommended image sizes are ignored as they are dynamically resized and made blurry. Attractions page images are randomly truncated. At first I thought it was always the top being cut off – but other images have the bottoms truncated. This process follows no set pattern.
3. To add an external http:// link to a page causes chrome to block the visitor from accessing the page as siteminder stupidly converts all http:// links to https:// links causing the browser to think they are a scam website as they are apparently promoting fake SSL certificates!!
Siteminder have been contacted about all these errors and months later have done nothing about them. Nice hey?
Anyway, apart from the annoying siteminder stuff – working for the Miami Hotel is great! One of my favourite jobs ever. And it incorporates my passion – street art photography; thanks for letting me work with you Kel!