Dragonfly Media Curacao

There are several companies and organisations on Curacao that represent Curacao abroad to bring in more tourism. The two most important ones in this respect are the Curacao Tourism Board (CTB) and the Curacao Hospitality And Tourism Association (CHATA).

Today these two organisations joined hands and presented the facts and figures for 2006 and moderated a discussion about the marketing plan 2008. Bo went to this meeting in the morning and I joined the afternoon session.

We are no off-line marketing guru so we can’t say very much about the what, where and when of promoting a Caribbean destination in the US, but we do know about the internet-side of this discussion. There are two things about the on-line marketing efforts which were discussed that piqued my interest. (more…)

Muller & Associates is a tax law firm on Curacao. They offer many services in the tax law arena like fiscal advice, help with audits and assistance if the tax collector has a beef with your company. An extra service they offer is a fiscal subscription where they take care of all your tax matters at a fixed monthly rate. We don’t know anything about taxes and such, but this sounds good.

The website looks very clean. The design is corporate, but not boring, and the color scheme is very appealing. It is available in three languages (Dutch, English and Spanish) and has a very flat structure. This makes it easily digestible without treating visitors like idiots. We like. (more…)

There are still a lot of misconceptions about Search Engine Optimization. Some of the people we talk to (potential clients or other design agencies) think that it’s as simple as submitting your website to the search engines and you will be found for the keyword “hotels”. Others think that it’s a dark art practiced with herbs, pentagrams and strange incantations when the moon is full. Some of us do drink herb tea in the evenings occasionally, but they stick to talking instead of chanting.

It is only natural that people have these misconceptions. Ask me to tell you everything I know about cars and I will also be done in 5 minutes and 2 minutes of those will be gibberish. That doesn’t mean I’m an idiot, it just means that I know more about SEO than I do about cars.

Search Engine Optimization is still a relatively young discipline (especially here on Curacao), it can be pretty complex and is certainly very dynamic. This is the perfect breeding ground for misconceptions. The more people learn about SEO and/or understand the reason why you should use it, the easier our work becomes. (more…)

Sentro Orto Fisiko Korsou is the practice of prosthetist Tom de Windt on Curacao. SOFK helps people that need a prosthetic limb. He helps local people as well as people from abroad that want to combine a holiday with getting a new prosthesis.

It looks like nothing much has been done on the website for the last few years and it is past due for an overhaul (or at least a content update). The website has been around for a while (since 2000, domain registered in 1998). Seeing that the first Curacaoan websites stem from 1997/98, 7 years is a respectable age here. (more…)

Curacao Actief is an environmentally conscious tourism company here on Curacao. In effect, this means that they organize tours and activities that go easy on the environment and help people understand the importance of conservation and the beauty of nature.

For a long time people have only taken advantage of nature on Curacao without giving back. It is good to see that eco-tourism is also on the rise on Curacao so our children can enjoy nature here as well.

When looking at their website we get the impression that Curacao Actief is a professional company with a vision and the business-savvy to turn their vision into reality. The homepage has a lot of information and a clear, straightforward structure. The internal pages are filled with information and are easily digestible. So far, this is looking like a well-made, functional website. (more…)

Two weeks ago we posted about our efforts for getting some pages out of Google’s supplemental index. The theory was that pages that have gone into supplemental are not getting enough internal link love. This theory was backed by material from Michael Martinez, Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin so we were pretty confident that this would work, but you’re never sure in SEO.

We decided to use a Wordpress plugin called popularity contest to display a list of most visited posts on every page in the blog. As a result of using this plugin every page on the blog would add a link to the ten most popular posts in the blog. This means that those most popular pages would get link love from about 100 sources and every new page would add another link. (more…)

Jeugdfonds Nederlandse Antillen (Youth Fund Netherlands Antilles) is a charitable organisation that wants to improve the life of children in general on the Netherlands Antilles. They do this by searching for partners to finance projects and by setting up new projects and grants.

JENA (short for Jeugdfonds Nederlandse Antillen) focuses on

• Projects that contribute to the necessities for improving youth welfare work in general
• Enhancement of chances and opportunities for young people to improve themselves
• Helping with continuity and safety in instituionalised activities in youth welfare work

These are all very worthy goals of course and luckily there are many people here on Curacao and the rest of the Netherlands Antilles that contribute with money and sweat to further their cause. Besides our monetary donations we also wanted to help with something we’re good at. Hence this report. (more…)

For some of the websites that we work with there are notable differences in the way they rank in Google and in Yahoo. For instance; a website might rank well in Google for a specific search term and be 10 to 30 places lower in Yahoo, or the other way around.

The problem lies in the fact that the search engines are fundamentally different and, because they don’t tell anyone how they work, nobody really knows what all defining factors are for ranking. So, the result is: everybody’s guessing at the differences between Google and Yahoo and nobody’s sure about how to rank well in both at the same time. (more…)

SEOmoz.org has a special section for people who want to publish their content on the SEOmoz-blog. The content in this Youmoz-section sometimes rivals the posts in the official blog in usefulness. One of these very useful articles was posted a week ago by Vincent Goldsmith.

In this post Vincent talks about what he has learned about SEO. In doing so he gives a very accurate account, in our eyes, of some of the fundamentals - as well as pitfalls - of SEO today. He sums up what he has learned in 6 bullet points:

1. Planning matters
2. Text is king
3. Content isn’t everything
4. Google isn’t everybody
5. Update regularly and be very patient
6. You can’t ever stop

Read Vincent’s complete article at Youmoz or at his own website.

Curacaohouses.com is the website of Curacao real estate agent Caribbean Villas & Yachts (CVAY). They sell and rent houses and villas throughout Curacao and the rest of the Caribbean. As the name of the company suggests CVAY also sells yachts. This is done through their sister website cvay.com.

Real estate is hot on Curacao right now. New houses and villas are being built all over the island and are being sold to locals, Americans and Dutch people alike. It seems like every week a new real estate agent sets up business on Curacao so the older real estate agents really need to market themselves to survive this onslaught of new businesses. One way to do this is by using the internet of course. (more…)