Yesterday we put another new web design live. This one is for the Curacao Ports Authority (colloquially known as the CPA). The CPA is the company that manages Curacao’s many harbors and ports and we are very proud that they chose us to create their new website (our competitors for this project were two very good, and well-known local web design companies).
The official blurb is on our web design clients page, so you can read all about it there.
We’re churning out websites like crazy these days. After a short lull during the summer holidays it seems like every company on the island wants a new website before the end of the year. We’re happy to oblige of course :D
Last week we launched two new websites. The first one was for a local magazine for management professionals; Coaching Magazine. We modified Wordpress to be used as a content management system and they are using it effectively to add content to the website themselves. For this project we worked together, again, with Bas Kok Creatieve Communicatie. He took care of the design and we turned his design into a fully-functional website.
The second launch of last week was the redesign of a Curacao beach and restaurant; Zanzibar. This beachbar and restaurant is one of the hippest places on Curacao and they wanted their new website to accurately reflect the unique look&feel of the place. Their old website was pretty cool, but it was all flash and they were doing terrible in Google and the likes. Their new website should remedy this.
The official blurbs are on our web design clients page.
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 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…)
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