Dragonfly Media Curacao

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.

Last Thursday we launched the new website of Curacao publisher Loket 1. This website is only three pages in size so it’s not the biggest project we ever did, but it is the first website within our partnership with BKCC. Bas did the design and we implemented it into a website.

The idea is that we will be doing this more often. BKCC is more at home with print work and marketing concepts than we are (he has been doing this work for 15 years now) and we are more adept at creating websites. This makes Dragonfly and BKCC natural partners that do not need to bite each other. Furthermore, this also gives us and BKCC opportunities to work more efficiently and to exchange information and ideas.

Yesterday we put the new website of Small Murray Scheper live. We are very happy to count this dynamic Curacaoan law firm as one of our clients and would like to wish them good luck with their new website.

The website is not entirely finished yet because we still need to add the English version, but the Dutch version is entirely finished. The design is slightly futuristic, but because of the warm, high quality photographs by Marika Ringnalda and the personal touches it has definitely not become a sterile website. For the official blurb, check out our clients page.

1. Cleanliness & Simplicity
A good website design has to contain text and images in balanced proportions. As a rule; pages that only contain text (or even only 50%) have a hard time retaining the visitor’s attention. Also you should take care with adding a lot of dynamic effects, java applets and flash because they can create problems in the visitor’s computers (problems with the pugins, etc.). Pages with a lot of effects can be dense, tiring and boring.

2. Defined Structure
A good design needs a clearly defined structure with an easy to understand navigation that allows the user reach all the information of the website. (more…)

Roughly two weeks ago we launched the new website of Caribbean Sea Sports. Caribbean Sea Sports is a dive center in Curacao which offers activities like diving, boat trips and all kinds of water sports. Their old website was made with frames, had a very old design and was not very user-friendly. For this reason Tom Zeck (the owner) asked us to create a new website for him and help him with his on-line marketing efforts.

One of Tom’s dive masters (Sadie) was a project manager in a previous life so he asked her to work with us in creating the website. With her help we defined the keywords to go after and set up a new structure. After this was defined she took care of the text and we set up the website.

The goal of the new website was not only to create a more user-friendly website with a more contemporary design, but also to make sure that the website was actually found with phrases other than “Caribbean Sea Sports” in Google, Yahoo and MSN. So far this is going pretty well. Google has indexed most of the new pages and allowed us to remove the old ones and Yahoo has indexed about 50% of the new website (but retains the old pages) . Regretfully MSN has only indexed the new homepage so far.

As for the statistics: so far we have seen an increase of about 50% in clicks coming from the search engines and we expect this trend to continue (and become stronger) during the coming weeks as Yahoo and MSN update their index. The really cool thing about the clicks coming from the search engines is the fact that the most popular search phrase is no longer “Caribbean Sea Sports”, but “sea sports” for which caribseasports.com is number 3 in Google. Another (now) popular phrase is “Curacao diving” for which this website is not very high yet in Google, but we are working on changing that.

So, we can quite confidently say that this project is going pretty well and we can expect some more interesting results over the coming weeks.

We received a press release today about the launch of a brand new travel website on boo.com. After reading the press release and doing some preliminary research we found it difficult to make up our mind about this website.

For the people that missed the dot-com bubble: boo.com was one of the great dot-com fiascos (it was rated number 6 in the list op top 10 dot-com flops over at cnet). The fashion website it used to host during the end of the last century was too heavy, not in touch with its audience and grossly missmanaged. But, the past is the past and Boo is as good a name for a travel website as it is for a fashion store.

The only independent review we managed to find on-line about the new Boo was over at dottourism.com, but they did not give an opinion about the website. The other websites we found with information about Boo were the ones that just rehash the press release.

As I said; it was difficult to make up our mind about this new website. So, I will just list the pros and cons that we see and I hope I will have my mind made up when I’m at the end of this post. (more…)

When building a hotel website our goal is to deliver a product that will convert a high percentage of visitors into online revenues The communication with our client is extremely important, and both parties (Client and Dragonfly) need to have a clear view of the process of design and development.

Keith Paulin is a leading online marketeer in the hotel industry and wrote the following article about ‘Hotel Website Design’ on hsmai.org that we like to share with you:

Hotel website design is one of the most subjective issues that hotel marketeers face. Here are some guidelines for briefing your hotel website designer…

So, you have finally read one too many articles about how 30.0% plus of your revenues should be arriving via the internet and that a further 30.0% are influenced by what they discover online about your hotel from your website…and the end of month reports show you are way short of those numbers.

You have taken an objective look at your website and you have decided its time to act…you need a new website for your hotel. You want to get it right this time but where do you start? (more…)

We are proud to announce that yesterday we put the new website for Caribbean Motors Curacao on-line. Their old website had gotten very heavy and unorganised and the design was definitely due for a make-over. You can find the new website at www.caribbeanmotors.com or you can check out the official blurb at our own website (www.dgfmedia.net).

This new website of Caribbean Motors Curacao is mostly about the design and somewhat about functionality. The new design is sleek and jazzy with a Caribbean touch. It is modeled after the Mitsubishi USA website, but a bit less fancy (the budget is a bit lower on Curacao than in the USA). (more…)

It’s the middle of the weekend and right now I don’t want to write anything about SEO, the hospitality business nor Curacao. This one is more about life in general and specifically the way Steve Jobs (Apple, Pixar,etc) sees it. Check it out for yourself at video.google.com.

Source: stephengates.com
The single largest problem that continues to hinder interactive design from really coming into it’s own is the fact that designers allow their work to be led more by technology or production techniques and not creative thinking.

As a creative director I have had tons of interactive portfolios come across my screen over the years and I see the same problem over and over again. Unfortunately most of this work has been produced in Macromedia Flash and that technology has taken a huge amount of criticism over the years. I personally believe that pointing to Flash as the reason for ineffective web design makes about as much sense as blaming paper for creating junk mail or the telephone for creating the solicitors who call during dinner. The fault should fall to the designers who have not taken the time to use a creative strategy as the basis of their work. (more…)