Wildfire recently took on a client that had a vacation rental house in Nicaragua. The client’s existing site was marketed towards surfers who were looking for those exotic breaks in far away lands. As you can tell from the screen shot below, surfers were the only target market they had thought of.

The old site did an ok job of promoting the property. It had one or two photos of the house, a few photos of the beach and surrounding breaks, brief contact info, and a handful of dead and broken links. However, the site was hampered by the limited marketing vision and with the development that I saw, if you didn’t know popoyorental.com, you weren’t going to find the site on any search engine. Even searching for the domain name wasn’t going to get you to the site. Overall, people weren’t contacting him to rent out the house so in that sense, the website was a failure. Chuck came to Wildfire because he was in the middle of doing a lot of renovations to the house and he really wanted to get it rented out so he could pay for his investment.

We had a few meetings with Chuck and really tackled his primary concerns. Because the original site was only targeting surfers, he was missing out on tons of traffic. In the process of the re-design we choose to expand the marketing focus to include surfers, families, tourists, and destination travelers.

DESIGN
The facelift from the old site to the new site was enough to make a world of difference before we even wrote any content. We organized the pertinent information in an easily digestible fashion so users could quickly navigate to what they needed to know about the house. We placed the navigation in a location that demanded attention as opposed to the old site where it was almost blending into the waves at the bottom of the page. Additionally, the new design made the amazing house and beautiful, natural surroundings a prominent feature to highlight the unique destination.

CONTENT
The old site has about 150 words site wide which is never going to get any attention from a search engine. After picking Chuck’s brain on everything we could think of, we developed search engine optimized content that would bring in traffic from all of our target markets. SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the best elements to add to any site to put it in front of your viewers. People can’t rent out the house if they can’t find it.

Before the content just stated that there was a house in Nicaragua on the beach for rent, when in reality there was so much more to it. You can rent out the entire house, just the upstairs, or just the downstairs. We added numerous pictures of the building and surrounding area as well so users could really get an idea of what this house had to offer.

Popoyorental.com is now one the first page of Google, Yahoo, and MSN for many of their top keywords, and thanks to the informative, marketing-style copy, Chuck gets regular emails about renting the house.

DEVELOPMENT
By simply re-building the website with web standard code and giving it a strong foundation for the SEO content, we gave the site an increased chance to become indexed on all the major search engines. Proper development is more important than people think. You can build two sites that look exactly the same and one can greatly out perform the other simply because of superior development (code) techniques. The build of a website is the solid foundation you place your site on. You wouldn’t remodel a house on a cracked foundation, why put your business on one?

MARKETING
Chuck didn’t really hire us to market and promote his website, but that didn’t mean we weren’t going to give him a great head start. After all, a successful website for him is a successful website for us. Considering that his old site wasn’t found on any search engine meant there were quite a few easy steps we could take that would greatly increase the exposure of his site to his audience.

The end result of Chuck’s new website was an extreme success. With the updated look and feel, content, development and marketing of his site, he gets at least an email every other day requesting rentals of the house, some requests are even a year and a half in advance.

Design and development are important steps in any advertising campaign. It is very easy to spot which projects were done by a professional and which ones weren’t. Your image portrays your company. Cheap image = cheap product. Many times your website is your first impression when users are reviewing your products or services. It’s best to put that first impression in the hands of people who know instead of trying to save a few bucks. It will be much less time consuming and much more cost effective to have it done right the first time rather than paying a reduced amount the first time around and then having to pay again to get it done right.