Dragonfly Media Curacao

Our latest and freshest website design is the new website of Hook’s Hut. Hook’s Hut is a laid-back, relaxed beach bar on Curacao near the Marriott, Hilton and Floris Suite hotels. During the day Hook’s Hut caters to the people on the family-friendly beach and around dinner-time the beach chairs are cleared away for guests to have dinner on the beach.

They have bands (jazz, merengue, salsa, calypso) four evenings per week and their happy hours are famous on the island. Hook’s Hut is also a great location for a romantic wedding (pictures) or for any other kind of party.

As Caribbean pirates are the main theme of Hook’s Hut the website needed to use this theme for the design. On the other hand, the beach bar can also be a very romantic place (hence the weddings) so we also incorporated a romantic touch. Oscar and Jerry (one of our interns) worked on this design together and you can be the judge if they succeeded in combining the two concepts.

Right now the website is only available in Dutch, but we’re working with the client on getting the English version on-line as well.

Tradewind Villas is a small complex of two luxury Curacao villas which are available for short-term rent. They are still working on the finishing touches of the accommodations, but it looks like it is going to be a fantastic property.

The villas are located in Bottelier which is an area in the south-east of Curacao (Banda Arriba) and from there you are just a stone’s throw away from some of the most popular beaches, restaurants and hiking areas.

The website is relatively small (6 pages per language, 2 languages), but we have a good feeling about its chances in the search engines for its most important keywords. It will be a question of gaining links to it and tweaking it over time. As the domain name is as fresh as the website it will probably suffer from the sandbox effect for a while, but that’s nothing a few good links can’t fix.

Recently we talked about the opportunities in Latin America (or better: the Latino market) for internet companies. Curacao is ideally positioned to do business in Latin America; not only because of its geographical location, but also for the fact that it has a stable government and there are strong ties with Holland.

The CIFA (Curaçao International Financial Services Association)  recognizes these opportunities and is organizing a conference from September 6 to 9. The title of the conference is the “Wealth and Business Preservation conference” and its aim is to show the benefits that Curacao can offer to so-called high net worth individuals for living and doing business in Curacao.

More information about the conference can be found on CIFA’s (Spanish) conference page. There is also conference information available in English, but the conference itself will be focused on Latin America and therefore the official language will be Spanish.

Recently we launched a new website for Sentro Orto Fisiko Korsou (SOFK). SOFK is a center for high-tech prostheses and orthotics run by Tom de Windt and his wife Mieke. Tom is the prosthesist and Mike is a physiotherapist. These people give hope to people who have lost a limb or have a physical defect (by birth or by accident) by giving them the means to cope with their problem. We are very proud that we could help them with their website.

For some time now I have been working on the website curacao.com. As the work I do for this site is apart from Dragonfly Media and as it is more technical in nature I never blogged about it here before. However, lately it is starting to become more interesting to blog about because the Tourist Board (owner of curacao.com) has started up an SEO make-over campaign.

The Tourist Board and I have been talking about it for some time now and they fully realize that optimizing your website is one of the most effective ways of getting more visitors (on-line AND off-line). The SEO report I made for them outlined a set of actions which would help in getting better rankings for the targeted key phrases. Once we have pruned the list of keywords and phrases to target, we will start implementing the suggestions.

The Curacao Tourist Board has graciously allowed me to report on the results in this blog so you can expect periodical updates here about the status of this campaign.

Disclaimer in the interest of full disclosure: Dragonfly Media and I have no authority whatsoever when it comes to the contents of curacao.com and associated websites. Any questions regarding the contents of and/or advertising on curacao.com should be directed to the Curacao Tourist Board or the companies/people that they have charged with authority in this respect.