Dragonfly Media Curacao

We are pretty proud of our new babies: a magazine and website about getting married in Curacao.
It is called ‘JaCuracao‘, which is Dutch for ‘Yes, or I Do’ - Curacao.

I was married last year December and during the months of preperations, I wondered many times why no-one had ever thought about making things easier to find for the bride-to-be.
Whether looking for the right location for the reception, or the dinner, or my make-up, I found that I really had to look around and ask around a lot.

Dragonfly Media is a member of the Curacao Hospitality and Tourism Association (CHATA) and we attend most presentations of CHATA as well as those of the Curacao Tourist Board (CTB) .
As CTB plans for marketing Curacao as a great destination for weddings & honeymoon, our choice was clear: we need to build a website that provides information about getting married or honeymooning in Curacao!

Publishing company Loket 1 is in charge of the magazine and we take care of the website.
‘JaCuracao‘ will be published twice a year and will be distributed, for now, among the major travel agents in Holland, the Antillenhuis, Curacao Tourist Board etc. Not only is it great for couples in Holland that want to get married but also local people that need to find information.

PS: this post was written by Bo and not Joost. Joost is still not married and does not wear make-up. Really, he doesn’t.

Every 6 months dozens of Curacaoan students need a company for an internship and hundreds of young people come from Holland to do their internship (”stage” in Dutch) on Curacao. That’s a lot of people for such a small island so sometimes it’s quite the rat race for these students to find their perfect company.

Usually we also get quite a few applications and it can be difficult to make a decision. And honestly; sometimes it’s a bit of a mess because we’ve never set up any rules, guidelines or deadlines for internship applications. We’re in the process of changing this and have set up some basic guidelines and a deadline for applying for an internship at DGF.

So, if you’re looking for an (web design) internship on Curacao check out our internships page and make sure you apply before the deadline ends.

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.

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.

The Curacao marketing & advertising professionals meetup of last Wednesday was a big success. In the true Caribbean fashion everybody was at least a half hour late, but the turn out was great.

We counted about 40 people (which is a lot for such a small island) when everybody was in. There were marketers (off-line and on-line), advertising agencies, photographers, designers and all kinds of other riff-raff. We hope that next time some more of the other web design agencies will also be able to come because the web should not be underrepresented here. (more…)

About two years I spoke with a friend of mine who was working with one of the big development/marketing companies in the US. He did some work in Curacao and saw a lot of potential; not only here, but also in the Latin American market. He pitched his idea of setting up an office in Curacao to explore and service the Latin American market to his boss but she shot his idea down. The reasoning was that they didn’t see a lot of value in that market. They did not want to go beyond the Caribbean Sea which they could service from Miami.

About two weeks ago the second Search Engine Strategies (SES) Latino happened and it looks like my friend was right on the money. The Latin American market is growing and has even been a #1 priority of Google for the last year. This specialized SES was the result of this growth and potential. (more…)

We were having some problems with the sidebar in the blog. It just stopped halfway through on some occasions, gave errors on other occasions and even worked fine sometimes as well.

We weren’t sure why this was occurring (we’re guessing that it’s probably a question of a too heavy load). Someone here on the island told me that maybe upgrading to the newest version would help and because I don’t like all the work involved in moving websites to different hosting plans I thought I’d give it a shot

So, we’ve got ourselves a brand new, spiffy blog. If you see any errors, could you please let us know so we can fix it or move to another server.

Curacao has its own set of rules on “how to do business”. Just like in all other countries, you need to know what’s acceptable behaviour and what’s not. One particular rule here is a real pearl of local wisdom (and a pet peeve of ours): “a competitor is a competitor is a competitor”.

We feel that if you see your competitor only as a competitor you’re limiting the progress of the line of business you are in. The result is a group of backward companies that are mostly concerned with what the competition is doing, instead of working to improve their own product.

The adherence to this rule is changing though. Especially in the more internationally oriented businesses there seems to be a trend towards cooperation (with a healthy dose of competition) instead of raw, unabiding competition. A shining example is of course the hospitality business, which is internationally oriented by default, with the CHATA as its Curacaoan flagship.

An attempt is being made now by Tamira La Cruz to also strengthen the ties between the marketing & advertising professionals on the island. (more…)

Bas Kok Creative Communicatie (one of our strategic partners) is looking for a graphic designer. Are you interested in working with some of the most interesting clients on the island and are based on Curacao? Give them a call!

You can find the official ad below and we added a translation for those of you that don’t speak Dutch (about 99.9% of the world’s population). (more…)

One of the most awful things that can happen to a company that engages in SEO is when Google says that that company’s website is harmful. Nobody will visit your website from Google while that warning is up, that’s for sure. This is exactly what happened to us this week:

Update june 15: yesterday evening the warning was removed. Google likes us again :).

The new stuff we try out, we always try out on our own website before we go anywhere near our clients’ websites. In this case we tried something out on our site which opened up a vulnerability. Somebody found it, took advantage of it and placed some malicious JavaScript on our homepage.

We figured out what happened, when it happened (last friday 10 a.m.) and how to fix it. So, we fixed it, checked our clients’ websites (just to be sure) and were pretty smug about it. Regretfully; over the weekend Google indexed our homepage and found the malicious JavaScript before we did. This triggered the “OMG, this site is evil”-button in Google on monday evening and we got blacklisted. When you look for our website in Google now you will see that Google thinks that “this site may harm your computer”. (more…)